Any risks involved when we have huge list of redirects in our website database?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have changed hundreds and thousands of page and page URLs for last 10 years in our website. So, now we are going to redirect most of the old pages/links to the current related pages. This will increase the number of redirects we set in our website database to thousands. Will this put any extra weight on crawler and any risks involved for employing too many redirects.

Thanks

[AdvisGroup]

Top of the morning to you!!

As long as you 301 redirect the old URL's to the current related pages, 90-99% of the page authority will transfer to the current URL. It would also be advantageous, if those old URL's contain duplicate or similar content, to set up "rel=canonical" tags for the current URL. The canonical tag basically tells search engine crawlers which URLs to index. I would also use a tool like AHREFS to research the page authority of these old URL's. If you have thousands of old URL's to transfer, it will really only benefit you, from an SEO standpoint, to transfer the pages with a higher page authority.

So, to answer your question, there is not a lot of risk, if you redirect correctly. It would also help, going forward, when there is a URL change, to automatically set up a 301 redirect, that way you don't have thousands to sift through.