Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
-
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time.
There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years.
- Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ?
- Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted?
- Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
-
Aleyda, this is super useful , thanks a lot for this excellent advice.
I will still need to do some research on how to best compile a comprehensive list of incoming links, as moz and search console data is still kind of limited for this purpose. -
Hi there,
The best way to identify if it's already safe to eliminate the 301 redirects from a previous Web migration/redesign is to verify if the old pages (you need to have a list of those old URLs) that were redirected in the past:
- Are still crawled and indexed? (You can check the indexation easily in Google with "site:" directly, and then if you identify these old URLs in Google Search Console Search Analytics, by filtering by pages). If so, which pages? Are they also ranking still well for relevant terms? Which ones? Identify why is still ranking instead of the new version of the page: Is the redirect correctly implemented? Going to a new version that is really relevant? The old pages being linked from internal or external sources that are passing high value? What's the historical and trend of crawling activity of those pages over time? Is it going down? (that you can analyze via logs).
- Are still getting traffic? Identify which source: is it organic search traffic? referral from other sites? You can check this by verifying the URLs activity from the old site version in Google Analytics.
- Are still being linked? A must if you're still ranking with these pages and traffic. Verify which sources are still linking to them and which are the one passing the highest value. Make the most to update these links to go to the new URL versions to stop passing value and traffic to the old URLs.
If you verify that these old URLs are not indexed, nor getting visibility or traffic anymore either from organic search or any other traffic source, then it's ok to eliminate the redirects.
Nonetheless, if they are still getting visibility & traffic you will need to keep the redirects, otherwise you will lose those visitors (and also give a bad user experience). The goal in this case would be to ask the previous questions among others to identify the reason why are they still being indexed, linked, etc. and update the relevant links, content, etc. to change this behavior and help Google to catch up with the URLs migrations.
I hope it helps
-
The problem is: It is delaying server response time to 1,5 seconds on average and is increasing significantly server load. We are talking here about more than 19.ooo rows with hundreds of rewrite rules based on URL patterns. So we have a pressing need to take action.
Is there a way to easily identify those URLs that triggered a 301 in the last 2 months? Doing it based on the apache logs seems a bit daunting as I did not find a tool that filters from the apache logs the 301s. Can I get this information from analytics or any other way easily?
-
Hi there,
Does it represent a problem for you, having those redirects in the htaccess?
Personaly, and in a SEO perspective, I will never delete the 301s redirects done in any site.The fact that those pages havent recieved traffic doesn't mean that the old URL might have any links or authority that is now redirected to the actual URL.
Here you have a Q&A question, answered by some experts:
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file - Moz Q&AHope it helps.
GR.
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
-
Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months
Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etakgoz
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?0 -
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
(Urgent) losing traffic after 301 redirect
We face a seo problem of losing traffic after 301 redirect.We have used 301 redirect from a sub-domain url to main domain, after a few month, we discovered that the traffic in google is dropped 40% as well as yahoo dropped 50% without reason, we have updated sitemap already, but we cannot find any reason for the traffic dropped till now..The original url (more then 5000 links)https://app.example.com/ebook Redirected Urlhttps://www.example.com/ebookThank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yukung0 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
Hi, This is a new one to me ?! I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages. Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on? The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s? I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet) Any help would be appreciated. Kind Regards Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thephoenix250