Should we optimise our internal links?
-
Hi again,
We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity.
We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time.
Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination?
Thanks all.
Clair
-
301 redirects no longer lose pagerank.
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
But, even though there is no loss of pagerank, I would recode those links promptly if they were on my website. Each redirect places load on the server, creates a small delay in page delivery, and it is simply best practice not to redirect links on your own site.
-
Vague is where SEO lies in the scale of things unfortunately as most things its all speculation on how Google works. As I mentioned it's all lots of little things, at some point you may want to do this but you may also find something a little more worthy of your time in the mean time. It also depends on the value of the page that 301 is affecting, if its a small page that you dont really use or care about again probably not the best use. Go with your gut!
Hope that helps
-
They can do Clair, but it really depends what they looked at. Technical can cause issues with SEO but so can content and backlinks and page usability (UX).
I haven't seen many times when changing a 301 redirect made any significant difference - at least not if it is just minimal hops.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the quick response.
It is one of the points raised and I do feel a lot of them are quite vague. But then as the answer above says perhaps all of these little changes to do make a difference when added together.
SEO is such a vague term these days!
-
Hi Greg,
Thanks so much for answering speedily. So you'd recommend taking the time to change these internal links to the current URL rather than the redirect URL?
It seems there are so many conflicting/vague opinions on SEO - it's hard to know what's best to do!
-
Hi Clair,
301's are absolutely fine to use, as long as they are used carefully - after all, that is why we have them. You also need to be aware, that any loss of link-equity is likely to be very small, so I wouldn't worry about this as a reason to undertake it.
As Greg said, a 301 will result in the new page being indexed so as long as there is just 1 or 2 hops as a maximum, then I really wouldn't worry about this.
Was this all that they found for you?
-Andy
-
Hello,
SEO is made up of loads of jobs that have a small affect compared to one big job that gets you that no.1 pos mostly. It's good to get your house in order so at some point i would recommend ensuring that users don't go through too many 301's. They are correct a crawler will index the destination of the 301 not the starting place.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage
I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides". When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved. For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically: Login page (/account/login) Search page (/search) Home page (/) Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page. Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher. A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'. A few thoughts were: The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue? Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues? There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer. The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also. It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrew_uba0 -
Unique content for international SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US. We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders. We are going to implement hreflang tags. I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique. This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content. Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geekyseotools0 -
What is future of Link building ? Any link building experts Here ?
Hey Everyone, its Muhammad Umair Ghufran I have one question about Link Building ? As my Knowledge Google Love the Quality content but Link building rank some low quality website Right ? So, what is the future of link building ; please explain indeep with complete reference for better understanding Thanks Regards: Muhammad Umair Ghufran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muhammadumairghufran0 -
Disavowing 100k Affiliate Links
Hi all, hope you're all good. I am updating our disavow file, we've noticed a couple more spammy links which are pointing at or site. While I was at it, affiliate links came to my mind. At the moment we have over 100k+ affiliate links pointing to the root of our site and other categories/products, most of them are do-follow. However, taking a look at WMT, it's one of our 'Who links the most' and the affiliate network is pointing a total of 115,065 links to us. My question; bearing it mind this site generates over 2million hits a month, is it really worth disavowing the entire affiliate link network. This would result is all of those 100,000 links being disavowed over time. Do you think this would result in a positive? Let me know your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Link Building on a small budget
Hi Folks I'm looking for recommendations from the community that can help me tic the requirements below; Looking for link-building services for a small start up. Prefer to work directly with the person doing the work. Prefer that they speak English 🙂 Have a small monthly budget so not looking for big organisations, rather a expert who is working on his/her own, and can have a phone conversation with me before engagement. Any-hoots I may be looking for a needle in a haystack here but any recommendations on people would be highly appreciated 🙂 PS: I know SEOmoz recommends some folks, but wow they are expensive ... can't afford that
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OMDAustralia0 -
Links directory: is it worth it?
Would there be any benefit or penalty for implementing a links directory with over 300 external links to websites that somtimes return the link? Or would it be more beneficial to simply ask for one way inbound links when gaining links? For example this section of this website: http://directory.flyawaysimulation.com/ This is their directory and most but not all of the sites in that directory link back to them. Your ideas, thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740