Should I stop redirectin 301, sometime?

[pablo_carrara]

Dear All,

I work for a southamerican ecommerce, I would like to know if you can help me out with the following.

This site is full of 404, more than 45K, so we are doing 301 to corresponding pages. The development team is asking me if we could stop doing the 301 in some time...In order to do this search engines should index only the url we are redirecting to, and not the one that is redirecting to the new one.

Currently they are redirecting in the HTML no by htaccess, so this means they have one page for each URL that needs to be redirected, and this is not efficient.

Bests,

Pablo

[rjonesx. 0]

This is a good and common question. There are two reasons why you would want to keep the 301 redirect in place

1. Usability: Users are still trying to reach this now defunct page
2. Inbound Links: There are external links that are pointing to this page.

The best thing to do is first narrow down the pages for which you have no reason to keep 301s in place. Open up your analytics platform and look to see which of those 45K pages have received no traffic in the last 30 days. Then use a tool like Open Site Explorer or Google Search Console to see if any of those 45K pages have inbound links. Chances are, most of those pages neither receive traffic nor have inbound links. Go ahead and drop the 301 redirect for all of those.

Then, prioritize the remaining pages. The ones with the most links and most traffic should probably retain a 301 redirect for the long run. Those near the bottom you might choose to drop.

Finally, with that many 404s, make sure that your 404 page is useful. Create a custom 404 page that helps direct users to their correct location or provides an easy search mechanism to find it themselves.

[Xtend-Life]

Hi Pablo,

What report are you using to find the 404 pages? Are they soft 404 or hard 404s? A lot of reports may return a 404 response for something like a failed file request which does not really impact usability.

If you have a consistent page name for your 404 pages, look under Analytics site content and filter by page title then search for your 404 page title - this will give you the actual failed page requests, you can then narrow down if they are internal page links or external.

It may be worthwhile checking what links are pointing to your 301 redirects and if there are links you want to keep, dropping them could have a negative impact on your site.

Regards,

Jason

[pablo_carrara]

Hi Russ,

Tnks, I like this kind of segmentation by inbound links and traffic, let me quote you

"Chances are, most of those pages neither receive traffic nor have inbound links. Go ahead and drop the 301 redirect for all of those" I think you mean (Im Argentine) I should use redirect for these URLs. which I dont think it make much sense since these are not the most valuable pages. I got your general idea, but let me know if you made I mistake when you wrote it.

I like what you said in general, but I wouldn´t like leaving 404 (even though they got no traffic or links) with out treating. So...questions...Meta no-index, does it work for already indexed pages? What do you think about using no-index + deleting these urls from index using webmaster tools.

Bests,

Pablo López Carrara

Cinepapaya

[pablo_carrara]

Hi Jazom,

Errors are hard 404. I like what you say, but I would like to know if it would be better to erase indexed pages from index.

Bests,

Pablo López Carrara

Cinepapaya

[rjonesx. 0]

Meta noindex + the URL Removal Tool would work to get rid of them. I would also try and make sure any old links internally on your site that may point to these pages get removed, if that is the step you are going to take. What will the user see when they land on these old URLs?

[PetSite]

I would just setup wild card 301 redirects via htaccess. Allows you to establish rules to redirect whole directories to new pages: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6877486/how-can-i-use-htaccess-to-redirect-paths-with-a-wildcard-character