I have several pages with the same topic, but different content that I write every year on a WordPress site, but because the information is useful for an exact period of time, instead of keep creating different pages every year, I thought on consolidating the pages into one master-page and keep updating it every year, instead of creating more pages.
So the question is how many 301 redirects can point to a page without hurting the SEO of the site with search engine?
I have around 5 topic that I would like to simplify with a master-post. One of the topics would have 15 redicters to the main page, and the other 4 topics would less than 6 redirects.
Is it better this way or it's better to delete the pages using 410 code?
Also, is there a rule of thumb of how many redirects can you use per day?
Well, there is no limit to the number of HTTP 301 redirects and this number does not impact SEO.
The only thing to avoid is too many redirect for the same page (i mean redirects in series) because it produces a lack of performance (loading speed) and so it damages the user experience.
Between choosing 301 rather than 410, you just need to know that a page with enough traffic should be redirected (HTTP 301), instead a page without traffic can be definitely closed (HTTP 410).
Don’t use more than 5 redirects in a redirect chain. Google Bot will not follow 301 redirects over multiple hubs.
Related
We have got a deprecated domain www.deprecateddomain.com. Specific fact is that we have got reverse proxy working and redirecting all requests from this domain to the new one www.newdomain.com.
The problem is when you type "deprecateddomain.com" in google search, there is a link to www.deprecateddomain.com in search results besides results with "newdomain.com". It means that there is such entries in google index. Our customer don't want to see links to old site.
We were suggested to create fake robots.txt with Disallow: / directive for www.deprecateddomain.com and reverse proxy rules to get this file from some directory. But after investigation the subject I started hesitating that it will help. Will it remove entries with old domain from index?
Why not to just create the request in search console to remove www.deprecateddomain.com from index? In my opinion it might help.
Anyway, I'm novice in this question. Could you give me advice what to do?
Google takes time to remove old/obsolete entries from its ranking, especially on low visited or low value pages. You have no control on it. Google needs to revisit each page to see the redirection you have implemented.
So DO NOT implement a disallow on the old website, because it will make the problem worse. Bots won't be able to crawls those pages and see the redirection you have implemented. So they will stay longer in the rankings.
You must also make sure you implement a proper 301 redirection (i.e. a permanent one, not a temporary) for all pages of the old website. Else, some pages may stay in the ranking for quite some time.
If some pages are obsolete and should be deleted rather than redirected, return a 404 for them. Google will remove them quickly from its index.
History/Context: I have a site, 'www.oldexample.com' built in 1998, HTML 4.01 transitional on Apache, cpanel server. Until last fall our main keywords got us to top 10. After mobile changes and Panda etc, Dropped to page 2 or 3 for all but one very specific keyword. The old site, 'www.oldexample.com' has many good back links and history in google and all main directories. I am rebuilding a test site now which is on 'mycompany.myshopify.com' as it addresses all my google errors issues on oldsite. I have set up my 'www.newexample.com' to redirect to the shopify site which is called up under 'www.newexample.com'.The myshopify.com URL does not show up at all.
Question: If I were to do cpanel 301 redirect of whole 'oldexample.com' to 'newexample.com' would I still benefit from the many links and history of oldsite?
When you say that the shopify URL doesn't show at all, do you mean it's not showing when you search for those keywords, or it's not indexed at all? If it's the latter, prompt Google to index it using Google Search Console. If it's the former, there are a number of things that could have affected this:
the authority of the new site - if you've just launched it, it naturally won't have the authority of the previous site and therefore is less likely to get visibility
you are correct that the backlinks would have played a major part in this. What you need to do is to redirect the old domain to the new one you want to appear in Google. For example, if you want to actually take people to newsite.shopify.com, you should redirect the old domain directly to that one. If you redirect the old one to newdomain.com, which you then redirect to newsite.shopify.com the result won't be the same. Link value is lost via redirects. Ideally, you should get in touch with as many 3rd party websites linking to your old domain and ask them to update the links to point to newsite.shopify.com
Even if you do that you might still not see those rankings because of various other factors. If you fancy posting the actual URLs and keywords in question, I can spare a few minutes to have a look.
I am currently working on a relaunch of a high trafficed website with thousands of pages. All urls are changing and for SEO reasons i know we should be putting 301 redirects in for old page to new page mappings. However, the old site has tens of thousands of pages, do i really put thousands of 301 redirects in place? isnt that bad for performance reasons? Any other suggestions or ways?
Thanks in advance.
If the URLs follow a regular pattern then you can set up more general redirects based on the format. For example if you're redirecting /category/page.php to /othername/page that is very easy to do with regular expressions in any server.
If there is no pattern then you could keep a lookup database that you check to redirect. It may be a little bit slower but not terrible performance. You can still list the top 50 or so pages to redirect in your server config.
Note, if you are using Apache then it's strongly recommended to put the redirect rules in your httpd.conf (stored in memory when Apache starts) and not .htaccess files (which are loaded on every page request).
At that scale you probably want to write some custom code and an indexed database table to retrieve the redirect info.
You're probably going to want to take a look at the most important pages on the site - perhaps categories and start the redirecting from there. There's no way you're going to be able to do tens of thousands of redirects because as you mentioned, there will be performance issues with that.
to make this simple, you can use wildcards and regular expressions in htaccess.
it'll only work if your website is properly organized in categories
Couple of months ago, we revamped our web site. We adopted totally new site structure, specifically merged several pages into one. Everything looks charming.
However, there are lots of dead links which produce a large number of 404 errors.
So how can I do with it? If I leave it alone, could it bite back someday, say eating up my pr?
One basic option is using 301 redirect, however it is almost impossible considering the number of it.
So is there any workaround? Thanks for your considering!
301 is an excellent idea.
Consider you can take advantage of global configurations to map a group of pages. You don't necessary need to write one redirect for every 404.
For example, if you removed the http://example/foo folder, using Apache you can write the following configuration
RedirectMatch 301 ^/foo/(.*)$ http://example.org/
to catch all 404 generated from the removed folder.
Also, consider to redirect selectively. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to check which 404 URI are receiving the highest number inbound links and create a redirect configuration only for those.
Chances are the number of redirection rules you need to create will decrease drastically.
301 is definitely the correct route to go down to preserve your page rank.
Alternatively, you could catch 404 errors and redirect either to a "This content has moved" type page, or your home page. If you do this I would still recommend cherry picking busy pages and important content and setting up 301s for these - then you can preserve PR on your most important content, and deal gracefully with the rest of the dead links...
I agree with the other posts - using mod_rewrite you can remap URLs and return 301s. Note - it's possible to call an external program or database with mod_rewrite - so there's a lot you can do there.
If your new and old site don't follow any remapable pattern, then I suggest you make your 404 page as useful as possible. Google has a widget which will suggest the page the user is probably looking for. This works well once Google has spidered your new site.
Along with the other 301 suggestions, you could also split the requested url string into a search string routing to your default search page (if you have one) passing those parameters automatically to the search.
For example, if someone tries to visit http://example.com/2009/01/new-years-was-a-blast, this would route to your search page and automatically search for "new years was a blast" returning the best result for those key words and hopefully your most relevant article.
i've been tasked with re-organizing a pure HTML site into a CMS. if all goes well, the new site will eventually become the main URL, and the old domain will be phased out. the old domain has a decent enough page rank, and the company wishes to mitigate any loss of page rank for that. in looking over the options available, i've discovered a few things:
it's better to use a 301 redirect when you're ready to make the switch (source).
the current site does not have a sitemap, so adding one and submitting it may help their future page rank.
i'll need to suggest to them that they contact people currently linking to them to update their links.
the process for regaining an old page rank takes awhile, so plan on rebuilding links while we see if the new site is flexible enough to warrant switching over completely.
my question is: as a result of a move to a CMS driven site, the links to various pages will change to accommodate the new structure. will this be an issue for trying to maintain (or improve) the current page rank? what sort of methods are available to mitigate the issue of changing individual page URL's? is there a preferable method beyond mapping individual pages to their new locations with 301 redirects? (the site has literally hundreds of pages, ugh...)
ex.
http://domain.com/Messy_HTML_page_with_little_categorization.html ->
http://newdomain.com/nice/structured/pages.php
i realize this isn't strictly a programming question, however i felt the information could be useful to developers who are tasked with handling this sort of thing in addition to development of the site.
edit: additions in italics
If you really truly want to ensure that page rank is not lost, you will want to replace the old content with something that performs a proper 301 redirect to the new location. With a 301 redirect the search spiders will know that the content is moved and the page rank typically carries over. It also helps external links.
However, the down side is that after a certain period of time you just have to get rid of the old domains.
You can make a handler for HTML files and map the old pages to the new structure with a 301 redirect.