Will really old links have any benefit being 301'd
-
I have a client who when they built their site never had any of their old links 301'd - I've now managed to locate a few of these links and am going to redirect them.
The site was rebuilt 2006/07 - and it ranked page one and #1 for lots of relevant keywords, if I redirect these to the current pages will the rankings still carry??
-
It should be easy to install a 404 page that records the agent and if you notice googlebot is still hitting these pages, no harm in 301ing them to let google know that we have moved and it doesn't need to bother about this urls anymore.
-
Odds are along the way that if the site is authority than it has picked up a good link or two to those pages. I would always 301 redirect to the most appropriate fresh page, unless the content was not evergreen (newsletter, paste events that are not relevant to the company and they no longer need to archive that information)
Hope this helps.
-
Depends on the authority of the site doing the linking and the relevance, authority and freshness of page it's linking from .
It might be good opportunity to start a discussion with the web master of the linking site to update their pages to link to newer/more relevant pages on your site.
As Mike (not related) says, it's unlikely to make much of a difference.
-
If you have old pages that still exist but are no longer relevant - you'll definitely want to 301 redirect them to the new page or new content. Check Open Site Explorer to see what type of inbound links these pages have, so you know what type of Page Authority you'll have pointing at your new page.
If the pages no longer exist (404 as Mike suggested above), there will be no benefit from 301 redirecting them to new pages, as Google has long since removed these pages from their index. It won't hurt you, but it won't benefit you either, so it's probably not worth the time.
-
Personally, I wouldn't worry about redirecting a handful of pages that have been 404ing for 6-7 years. Odds are they don't rank for anything, Google has removed them from the index and they'll have little to no traffic going to them. Though I don't think they'll hurt you if you were to redirect them to a relevant live page... I just don't think you'll gain much from doing so.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Manual Action - When requesting links be removed, how important to Google is the address you're sending the requests from?
We're starting a campaign to get rid of a bunch of links, and then submitting a disavow report to Google, to get rid of a manual action. My SEO vendor said he needs an @email domain from the website in question @travelexinsurance.com, to send and receive emails from vendors. He said Google won't consider the correspondence to and from webmasters if sent from a domain that is not the one with the manual action penalty. Due to company/compliance rules, I can't allow a vendor not in our building to have an email address like that. I've seen other people mention they just used a GMAIL.com account. Or we could use a similar domain such as @travelexinsurancefyi.com. My question, how critical is it that the domain the correspondence with the webmasters be from the exact website domain?
Technical SEO | | Patrick_G0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
On-Page Report Says 'F', and I'm Confoozled As to Why
I'm primarily interested in how we failed in our "Broad Keyword Usage in Title" category. The Keyword Pair we're gunnin' for is: "Mac Windows" Our current page title is: "CrossOver: Windows on Mac and Linux with the easiest and most affordable emulator - CodeWeavers" This is, I grant, ugly. However, bear with me. SEOMoz Report Card says "Easy Fix!" and suggests: "Employ the keyword in the page title, preferrably as the first words in the element." I humbly submit that "Mac" and "Windows" IS in the page title. So what am I missing? Is it the placement of the words relative to each other, or relative to the start of the sentence? Or is the phrase "CrossOver:" somehow blocking the rest of the sentence from being read? Are colons evil? I'm genuinely mystified as to why (from a structural standpoint) our existing title tag is failing this test, and I'd be delighted for answers and/or feedback. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CodeWeavers0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
Negative effect on google SEO with 301's?
Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info - into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content. Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them. Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective. Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think? Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
No. of links on a page
Is it true that If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670