Cutting off the bad link juice

[ThinkingJuice]

Hello,

I have noticed that there is plenty of old low quality links linking to many of the landing pages. I would like to cut them off and start again. Would it be ok to do the following?:

1. create new URLs (domain is quite string and new pages are ranking good and better than the affected old landing pages) and add the old content there

2. 302 redirect old landing pages to the new ones

3. put "no index" tag on the old URLs (maybe even "no index no follow"?)or it wouldn't work?

Thanks in advance

[OlegKorneitchouk]

If your rankings are being hurt by these links, I would move them to a new URL and 404 the old page. I would then go through the link profile for the old URLs. Find all the high quality links and contact the webmasters asking to change it to the new URLs.

[ThinkingJuice]

Thank you Oleg,

I have checked and have a few .gov.uk links going to some of those pages which generates some traffic, so not sure if 404 on them is the suitable in the situation.

On the other hand why 404 is better than 302? They both stop link juice passing but 302 passes the traffic.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

302 by definition is "Temporary Redirect", which is not applicable here. According to this 302 experiment, 302's did actually pass some authority down (which may or may not hurt you). I do see the UX advantage to having the old URL redirect to the new page though.

Another alternative is to block the page via robots and set up a redirect or noindex the page and set a timed meta refresh redirect to the new page.

[Modi]

Hello Oleg,

Am also interested in knowing more about it

Does marking a noindex, follow or noindex, nofollow to that page is a better way than 404 redirect ?

Also, i dint get you for meta refresh redirect. What does it mean like ?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

So his goal is the have users redirect to the new page without having Google pass the link authority to the new URL.

If you noindex the page, G won't be able to access it and it will lose all its authority. But any user that visits the page will still be redirected to the new url. There is no such thing as a 404 redirect.

Meta refresh is another way to redirect users to a new page without passing authority. As long as the time is greater than 0 (meta refresh of time=0 is treated similar to a 301), it shouldn't pass authority. So same deal, noindex the page and set up a redirect for users, not bots.

[Modi]

Sure, thanks

Does it mean if we noindex it - can it be safely presumed that all the low quality links pointing to that url will be nullified and it will not have any negative effect to the site. I mean there wont be any need for making the page 404, if we still use that page as regular part of the site, like for filling forms etc.

Many thanks, once again for your detailed reply

[MikeRoberts]

NoIndex won't cut the links. It will just remove the page from the SERPs. So you'll still be hit with the bad links to your site and organic traffic will be cut off.

[Modi]

Sure, But Oleg said, "If you noindex the page, G won't be able to access it and it will lose all its authority".

If in case the page loses all its authority - does it still will pass on the negative value to the domain or other pages due to low authority or spam backlinks pointing to it

If its true, then may be making the page cut off from site by marking it 404 is a better way !!

[MikeRoberts]

Personally I would go with Oleg's original suggestion: "If your rankings are being hurt by these links, I would move them to a new URL and 404 the old page. I would then go through the link profile for the old URLs. Find all the high quality links and contact the webmasters asking to change it to the new URLs."

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Upon further research, you are correct. A noindexed page is still crawled and indexed, just not in SERPs. So any links will still be followed and the page is still a part of the website. With this in mind, I think you should 404 the page and redirect via meta refresh after some time. Reach out to the webmaster's of the good links and ask them to change the new URL.

I still don't think a 302 is the way to go in this scenario. Ideally, you'd experiment with different options and see which produces the best results.

[Modi]

Does it seems perfectly okay to make the site page (linked by spam links) to have 301 redirect to show 404 error page

As if its a CMS system where many other pages are linked through other subcategories too of the component, so the option of cutting down the bad page, which is hurt by low quality links is through 301 redirect to land to 404 error page. Will it diminish or rather make completely off the value of all spam links pointing to it and finally does not affect the site at all.

[ThinkingJuice]

Hello all,

Thank you for your answers,

Oleg, I am not that keen on meta refresh, as it is poor user experience - apparently it needs to be about 10 sec, as shorter time G. may treat as 301. Wonder what is the shortest time I can use which will lose the link juice but wouldn't disturb my visitors.

Gagan, in regards to 301 redirecting the bad page to 404 page..isn't that easier just to make it 404 without redirect?

Mike, what do you think is the best solution to keep the traffic but cut off bad links to specific landing pages.

I will be testing 302 soon from old URL to new one. Wonder if I ALSO should put 404 on the old one...or maybe no index...or it doesn't matter? What are your thoughts?