What if my developers tell me they can only handle a certain amount of 301 redirects?

[CHECOM]

We recently launched a new site and I felt the need to redirect all of our old site URLs to the new site URLs. Our developers told me they would only be able to do about 1000 before it starts to bog down the site. Has anyone else came across this before? On top of that, with our new site structure, whenever our content team changes a title (which is more often than i had hoped), the URL changes. This means I'm finding i have many other redirects I need to put in place, but cant at the moment. Advice please??

[TranslateMediaLtd]

It seems to me that your developers are placing the 301 redirect rules in something like a .htaccess file. In this case, it is better to have fewer redirect rules to keep the size of the file down.

But why don't they store the original URL and new URL in a database - which can be queried and the appropriate 301 header initiated to allow the redirect to take place (if appropriate)? This way you could easily add a few thousand without any performance issues.

As far as the titles/urls are concerned, the system shouldn't change the URL every time the title changes. This will cause problems in the future. I'd ask the developers to change this.

[AlanMosley]

301's do take resources, but very little, but there has to be a limit, 1000 is a lot.

why do you need so many?

With your old site see what pages had external links, and 301 them, there is no reason to 301 those that do not.

[Davinia22]

Hello,

I assume you want the 301 redirects so that you can carry over any SEO goodness the old site had to the new site. I wouldn't recommend using redirects for your entire site, the benefit is not often worth it. This is what I'd recommend:

I'd place 301 redirects on the old homepage (to new homepage) and same for top entry points of secondary pages only. All other pages I'd use canonical links (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en) from old site to new site. And, be sure to use Google Webmaster Tools to inform of the new domain name. Over next few months go to the websites that drive high levels of traffic to your website (i.e. referral sites) and ask them to change the domain name from old to new.

If your CMS is up for it you can also build into the platform a canonical module which can stop the URL changing when the title of the page changes. Highly recommend you sort this particular issue quickly.

Hope that helps,Davinia

[AlanMosley]

This would only work if the old site is still live, you need to place the canonical tag in the old page pointing to the new page to transfere link juice.

You can only transfer link juice thought a request (eg: a link)if no links point to old pages, there is no need for the link juice