Website Redesign 301 Question

[RobinBryant1]

Hey Moz gang,

I have a question that I believe I know how I'm going to handle, but just wanted some feedback from the Moz community on best practices.

At my company, we're going through a site redesign. At the moment, our site is deeper than it should be with many one-off feature pages. For example, we have a Features page that then links to individual pages for each specific feature.

One goal we have set for the redesign is a condensing of the pages in order to make the site more user-friendly, easy to manage and content rich.

My question is this. We have a lot of these individual pages that I want to essentially kill and merge into one page. It is okay (best practice) to 301 all of those individual feature specific pages to the single Features page since that is now where all of that content lives??

I want to retain the link juice that those pages have gained over time, but I don't want to get penalized for too many 301's to a single page.

Any advice or previous experience would be awesome Thanks,

Lance

[Zachary_Russell]

Hello Lance

In general, a 301 redirect tells google, "hey, this page moved and is now at this URL." With that being said, here are some best practices:

If you are literally just merging pages into one, within reason, then there is no problems with redirecting them to the new page.

If your just completely trashing the page because it serves no value, than have the redirect go to the next category up, or, have the individual features page go to the features page once you delete them. I would ask myself this question, "If I was a user following a link that links to the 301d page, where would the next-best pertinent page be?"

Be aware of the number of 301 redirects any specific link has. Ideally, there should only be one.

If your concerned with link juice, which you stated you are, what is stopping you from contacting the webmaster of the site that links to that page and ask them to change the URL on the link, stating that you redesigned the site and the URLs have changed. The worst they can say is no, or nothing at all, or they can take the few minutes out of their day and change it.

A great way to do this is use OSE to get the links to any given page on your site, and then run it through one of the numerous tools to find the whois contact info of that domain, or just use their "contact us" page.

Hope this helps,

Zach

[RobinBryant1]

Hello Zach,

Thanks for responding to my question!

This is precisely the answer I was hoping to hear from the Moz community. We do plan to merge these feature specific pages into one all-inclusive page, so I was planning on 301'ing them as you stated. And I've been tracking our external links to these pages using OSE, so contacting those webmasters will be my first step once we launch the new site.

Thanks again Zach, you rock!