Do I need to do 301s in this situation?

[kevin_h]

We have an e-commerce site built on Magento 2. We launched a few months ago, and had about 2K categories. The categories got indexed in Google for the most part. Shortly after launch, we decided to go with SLI for search and navigation because the native search/navigation was too slow given our database.

The navigation pages are now hosted navigation pages; meaning, the URLs have changed and they are now hosted by SLI.

I have done 301s for the most popular categories, but I didn't do 301s for all categories as we have to go through each category one-by-one and map it to the correct navigation page. Our new category sitemap only lists the new SLI category URLs.

Will the fact that we have not 301'd all of our former categories hurt us as far as SEO? Do I have to do 301 redirects for all former category pages?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Kevin

In short yes you do.

The thing is that if the categories are indexed in Google and someone clicks on one it will 404 which is not a great user experience. Also if those URLs are listed anywhere else in directories, blogs or any other site then visits from those sources will also 404. It's just very bad practice. Can't you just scrape all of the URLs, put them in a csv, add the new URLs and copy to .htaccess as a quick way of doing it?

By the way having navigation pages hosted externally on non-company URLs sounds like an SEO disaster to me. Your site's natural hierarchy from home>cat>product has the cat part on an external server. I can't see how this can possibly be good for SEO. Do your product URLs contain the category?

Regards Nigel

[kevin_h]

Nigel,

Thanks for the feedback.

The product pages do not have the categories in the breadcrumbs. It is just home > product.

The thing is, the category pages that were indexed are already deindexed. And, we didn't build any links to the category pages as it was a new e-commerce site. I will try to see if there is a faster way of mapping the native categories to the hosted navigation pages.

Although it is much faster and more user friendly, I do regret using hosted navigation on the site now. Also, I may not use the hosted navigation service at the end of the year. I am wondering if I should hold off on the 301s, as will have to reverse the 301s if we cancel the service. What are your thoughts?