Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?

[amag]

Hi everyone!

Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/

We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/).

Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page?

Thank you!

• Matt

[Nozzle]

Well if you redirected the whole /avengers folder and not just the page, you wouldn't necessarily need to redirect the /hulk page.

The benefit in redirecting the /avengers/hulk page is if you have links pointing to that page, you want those links to now point to the new version of that page so you continue to get the best value out of any links to that page from relevant content.

"Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page?" There would be no harm if you left the hulk page at /avengers/hulk if you only redirected the page /avengers and not the folder /avengers.

[amag]

I should add that internal links, breadcrumbs, menus, etc. are all pointing properly to the /marvel/avengers/hulk page correctly.

We're worried about losing a bit of PageRank if we 301 to /marvel/hulk/ and weighing if there is a benefit to doing it that would outweigh any PR loss.

[Nozzle]

Well if you do change the URL and setup the 301 redirect, you can always change, and should change, all the internal links to point to the new URL.

As far as losing any PR, Google announced back in 2016 that 301 and 302 redirects no longer lose PageRank. You can read about it in Cyrus Shepard's post, https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo.

He states:
"While it’s super awesome that Google is no longer “penalizing” 301 redirects through loss of PageRank, keep in mind that PageRank is only one signal out of hundreds that Google uses to rank pages.

Ideally, if you 301 redirect a page to an exact copy of that page, and the only thing that changes is the URL, then in theory you may expect no traffic loss with these new guidelines."

It sounds like the only thing that will change in your situation is your URL so you should be able to move forward with confidence that 301 redirecting /marvel/avengers/hulk to /marvel/hulk won't have any sort of negative effects, (at least not long lasting).

But if you're still feeling cautious, it's fine to not change this one URL.