What is the Proper Use of 301 redirects for SEO purposes?
-
I heard and read from different sources that 301 redirects from aged domains with healthy link profiles is great to boost a sites rank as oppose to building a site around the page and linking it to the domain you want to rank. Whats is the best practice for this strategy?
Thanks
-
Take every 301 redirect you can get. There may be link equity which is unitilsed there.
-
Thanks for the quick response Matt. It make complete sense thanks for the intel.
-
Well a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect so it passes on 90-99% of link juice gained by the page your are redirecting. Therefore it would be better to 301 redirect an old page domain with a healthy link profile as you will pick up benefit from the multiple links gained as opposed to one link from a site of reasonable authority if you were to build a site around that page. The ranking impact from the redirect will be far greater as you are essentially gaining multiple links in one hit once the search engines catch up and recognize the redirects, thus having the greatest impact on ranking in relation to the two methods you mention above. Hope this makes sense...
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
-
How to speed up transition towards new 301 redirected landing pages?
Hi SEO's, I have a question about moving local landing pages from many separate pages towards integrating them into a search results page. Currently we have many separate local pages (e.g. www.3dhubs.com/new-york). For both scalability and conversion reasons, we'll integrate our local pages into our search page (e.g. www.3dhubs.com/3d-print/Bangalore--India). **Implementation details: **To mitigate the risk of a sudden organic traffic drop, we're currently running a test on just 18 local pages (Bangalore) = 1 / 18). We applied a 301 redirect from the old URL's to the new URL's 3 weeks ago. Note: We didn't yet update the sitemap for this test (technical reasons) and will only do this once we 301 redirect all local pages. For the 18 test pages I manually told the crawlers to index them in webmaster tools. That should do I suppose. **Results so far: **The old url's of the 18 test cities are still generating > 99% of the traffic while the new pages are already indexed (see: https://www.google.nl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:www.3dhubs.com/3d-print/&start=0). Overall organic traffic on test cities hasn't changed. Questions: 1. Will updating the sitemap for this test have a big impact? Google has already picked up the new URL's so that's not the issue. Furthermore, the 301 redirect on the old pages should tell Google to show the new page instead, right? 2. Is it normal that search impressions will slowly shift from the old page towards the new page? How long should I expect it to take before the new pages are consistently shown over the old pages in the SERPS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robdraaijer0 -
301 redirects
One of our employees took an SEO class recently. She was told that having too many 301 redirects can hurt SEO. I have never heard of 301 redirects as having a negative impact. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
.Com version of my site is ranking better than .co.uk for my UK Website for branded search. 301 redirect mess
Dear Mozzers, I have an issue with my UK Website (short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD ) whereby when I type my company name in to google.co.uk search the .com version returns in Search as opposed to the .co.uk and from looking at open site explorer the page rank of the .com is higher than the .co.uk ?. Infact I cant even see the .co.uk homepage version but other pages from my site. The .com version is also 301'd to the .co.uk. From looking at Open Site Explorer, I have noticed that we have more links pointing to .com as opposed to .co.uk. Alot of these are from our own separate microsites which we closed down last year and I have noticed the IT company who closed them down for some reason 301'd them to the .com version of our site as opposed to the .co.uk but If I look in http://httpstatus.io/ (http status checker tool) to check one of these mircosites it shows - 301 - 302 - 200 status codes which to me looks wrong ?. I am wondering what it should read ... e.g should it just be a 301 to a 200 status code ?. My Website short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD and an example of some of 10 microsites we closed down last year which seems to be redirected to .com is http://goo.gl/BkcIjy and http://goo.gl/kogJ02 As these were redirected almost a year ago - it is okay if I now get them redirected to the .co.uk version of my site or what should I do ? They currently redirect to the home page but given that each of the microsites are based on an individual category of my main site , would it be better to 301 them to the relevant category on my site. My only concern is that , may cause to much internal linking and therefore I wont have enough links on my homepage ? How would you suggest I go about building up my .co.uk authority so it ranks betters than the .com- I am guessing this is obviously affecting my rankings and I am losing link juice with all this. Any advice greatly appreciated . thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Shall I use a 301 or 302 redirect when people leave the company?
Hello, At my company, we have instances where client-facing people leave the company and so we need to remove their profile page from the website. As opposed to people receiving a 404 when they search for them, I thought it would be best to divert visitors to a generic landing page to explain that the person they are looking for has left the company with details on how to get in touch. I'm tempted to use a 302 redirect so the person they are searching for stays in the search results longer. But longer-term, will this cause any harm? Should it be eventually be turned into a 301 redirect? Or should I just use a 301 in the first instance. Thanks in advance, Stu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stuart260 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Map with usability and SEO purpose
For my client I need to add some structure to its pages. The deepest pages are about restaurants and are sorted per city and then per province as a larger silo. I want to do this: Homepage > Provinces > Cities > Restaurant page This structure is optimal, but I as a usability freak I prefer making the experience cool for the users. I want to add interactive pictures that are cool for the user and hopefully are readable for the google bots, I want to do it like this: The homepage shows a map of my country that has the twelve provinces outlined, that light up when you hover over them. Then when you click a province you get to the province page. On the province page you see a large image of the province and see all cities where there are restaurants, when you hover over a city it grows a little and when you click it you arrive at the city page, at that page you will find a list of all restaurants that are available in the city. What I need to know is, is it possible for google to see these pictures as a nice site structure? Or do I need to add the ugly footer links and have pages with lists of links...? And what is the smartest way to structure this, flash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lebron270 -
301 redirect hell.... How do you de-commission an old site
Hi SEO experts: We operate a vacation rental website and around 1 year ago moved to a different platform. Because our pages are arranged by location (what we refer to as Locales) we need to put 301 redirects for all the old locale pages. So for example: www.example.com/__Skeggness.cfm redirects to www.example/com/vacation-rentals/locale/skeggness But here's the problem: We can't seem to get Google to drop those old __{locale_name}.cfm pages... even after over 12-months of the new site going live! Other clues we've noticed: The old underscore URLs show up in our SERP sub-links Sometimes google shows the new page title and description but attributes it to the __{locale_name}.cfm URL (aghh!!!) One suggestion we received was to use the URL removal tool in Google WMT.... But given we have 1,000's of locales i don't see that as being affective. Questions: Any suggestions on how to get Google to drop these old URLs and use the new ones? Is this situation hurting our SEO? Or do you think its benign... and I should just take a deep breath.... and relax at little more...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0 -
Where can I find knowledgeable website developers that know about proper seo!?
I am running a large ecommerce fitness equipment store. It is on magento and there are lots of little issues with the site. Things like url strucutre, not enough text for google to read as far as menus and too many images etc. I am wanting to work with a company that totally understands what I need done to the site to fix it and make sure its in its absolute best shape for seo. I need a real consultant that can help me make changes to my site. I cannot seem to find someone when outsourcing to overseas like india and stuff. Does anyone know of anyone or a company I can contact? If you know of multiple please list. Thank you very much Jake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0