Importance of 301 Redirects

[stageagent]

Hello,

I have been brought in at the last minute to consult for an e-commerce client who is about to relaunch their website. The site currently receives 8000 visits a month, 3100 of which are from organic search. They have a few thousand product pages.  The web development firm they are using is changing all of the old product page urls and using 'search engine friendly' urls for the new site, which is expected to launch in a few weeks. However, they did not/are not planning on including 301 redirects from the old URLs.

Other than simply stating 'this will be bad for your SEO', what would be a correct way of explaining to the client how much of a problem it will be if their new site launches without 301s. For example, is this a big enough issue to delay the launch of the site / get in a contract dispute with the web developer?

[danatanseo]

Hi Jason,

Having been in your situation before I can emphatically confirm that not doing any 301 redirects is a recipe for a disastrous relaunch. To answer your last question first, yes, it is absolutely something worth delaying the launch and yes, get in contact with the developer. He/She will be your best ally in trying to convince stakeholders that the 301s are crucial to the success of relaunching. While the developer most likely already understands why 301s are so important, putting all of that technical-SEO-babble into laymen's terms is harder.

Use pictures.

Make a screenshot of a 404 error page. Then, show with pictures, how much traffic the top 10 pages on the current site are getting and how many people link to them...again...use pictures, draw them if you have to.

Then, make a Screencast showing what's going to happen to any visitor who tries to visit the site via a bookmarked URL (choose a really ugly scary looking 404 page...for effect).

Then, manage expectations (just in case they don't listen to you an proceed without the 301 redirects)...Use more pictures...Show what you anticipate will happen to traffic when they go this route. Make it clear that they may never recover. Relaunching alone, even with 301 redirects in place, can leave a website gasping for air. Tell them to expect less traffic, even with the 301s, and that without them it will be even worse.

Look for some real world examples....I'm sure there are dozens of folks here who have lived through the pain of a relaunch and have stories to tell.

Good luck. May the force be with you!

Dana

[AlanMosley]

First do these pages have any external links?

if not then there is no gain from a 301, if some of them do, the redirect those pages

[WorldText]

Excellent response from Dana to which I can add only one thought:

What's their backlink profile like now?  Do many of their product pages have links to them?  Do any have a decent number of links?

If they 404 all those links it's going to hurt.  You know that already.

Some stats of how their backlink profile is going to be affected might also help your case.

[Everett]

I always wonder though, how much non-link data is lost on such a page that could have an effect on rankings... such as the age of the page?

[AlanMosley]

you have a point, But if your page has no links, then it is likely search engines see it as poor quality been around so long yet no links, so for that reason the page age may be a bad signal, at least not one worth keeping

If in fact page age is even looked at.

It may also be that the age is not transferred, this link is all I know about age

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pnpg00FWJY&feature=player_embedded

It talks about domain age not page age, but Matt talks about the first time they crawl a domain. If we adapt that to a page I would suggest that they will look at the first time the crawl a URL so changing a url will be enough to lose the age.

OK I don't have inside knowledge of google, but I do know how a 301 works and I can give a you a pretty good guess. A 301 tells a request to make a new request to a new url. I think that google follows it just like that, here is a new page, it has no relevance to the old page its just a new url. to imagine that they keep a record of all 301s where a page used to be for ever, I find hard to believe. When they crawl a external link, they get retuned a new url and the link juice is redirected again thought a second request(hence the second loss of link juice.) and finds the new page where the link juice lands.

Think of a page that has many 301s from many old pages, then it would have many ages, I would suggest google keeps it simple, they just follow the 301 to a new url and treat it as a new found page and distribute the link juice as they would any other page they and on.

For a bunch of pages that don't have links, I cant see any difference, but what I would worry about is page speed. reading a long set of 301 code then trying them can slow a site down (remember we are talking about a large number here). If you can simple do all your 301's with a few lines of code then that's not a problem, but if you start to get a long list then its going to a be a problem for every page in the site.

back to your point, I have also had thought about this, but for a slightly different reason, and that is original content, if your page was from 2001 and you were scraped in 2003 and will the 2003 scrape now get the original content credit. but then this may e the case anyhow even with a 301, and again, I don't think this is a big problem because sites that scrape are not likely to be given credit, they will have lots of scraped content and will be known as a scraping site and not be awarded credit.

[stageagent]

Thanks for all the great responses so far. The site was registered in 1997 and the current site has been up for 6 years. Here's the link profile for the site:

Domain Authority - 32

Domain MozRank 4.08

Domain Moztrust 4.86

Esternal Followed Links 258

Total External Links 271

Total links 59,852

Followed Linking Root Domains 71

Total Linking Root Domains 76

Linking C-Blocks 46