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Hi Dirk,

You got it right. All the pages we redirected were pointing to similar pages once, so probably they should be okay as u said.

Regarding disavow; what are the metrics to decide on a link? Some links might be good looking with decent DA and might be hurting us. What's the best way to findout actual back-links dropping us down. Disavow comes with risk as there are chances we may reject good links, so it's better to make sure about the links.

Thanks,

Satish

Hi,

I have seen some of our competitors are missing from top SERP and seems to be penalised as per this penalty checker: http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/. Is this right tool to check penalty? Or any other good tools available?

Are these penalties because of recent Penguin update? If so, is this a automated or manual penalty from Google? I don't think all of these tried with black-hat techniques and got penalised. The new penguin update might triggered their back-links causing this penalty.

Even we dropped for last 2 weeks. What's the solution for this? How effectively link-audit works?

Thanks,

Satish

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the response with a detailed answer. Very informative. We have decent number of redirects from homepage and top tier pages too. So I decided for this activity.

Regarding "auto redirects", we have redirected tens of links these days in the process of link reclamation to increase the back-links and pagerank/da. But we have significantly dropped post such redirects even though we have cross examined to make sure the incoming links are relevant to current pages we are linking. However, those external links were pointing to our pages in past.  But as we deleted many pages in process of website redesign and content update, we replaced such pages. Why actually they consider such as soft 404 even we redirect non-existing pages to almost same pages with high relevancy? I think some of the links we reclaimed are kind of spammy and pushed us down. What's your idea on this. Thank you.

-Satish

I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts?

Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages.

Thanks,

Satish

Thank you....Got it from screaming frog as u said

I want to find the complete internal redirects on website. Just internally linked. How to find such?

Hi Furtak,

Could you please share your views on our post here about redirecting:

https://moz.com/community/q/redirecting-homepage-to-2nd-tier-page

Thnaks,

Satish

We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect.

Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page.

Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page.

Thanks,

Satish

Hi Furtak,

We haven't improved rankings even after removing those redirects. We hardly had any changes around this ranking drop period. So, Penguin might hurted us with it's auto action. No manual actions from Google too.

There are some spammy links pointing to our website as per Moz. Shall we disavow them? Will there be any risk doing it?

Thanks Furtak for such valuable information.

Do you think removing those redirects help us?

Hi Furtak,

I think penguin had played here, because we improved ranking on Sep 1st and 2nd and dropped two weeks later when we redirected around 10 links. We are on the way to remove those redirects to back to the improved rankings. Will that helps?

Is there any exact correlation between 301 redirects and penguin silent penalty? But we have just redirected the links, but haven't created any unnatural. These were very natural links once. And what are the specific metrics we have to decide a bad link? Definitely, we will contact you in case of your assistance by understanding the current scenario.

We have found few external links pointing to our non-existing pages (404). Then we have redirected those non-existing pages to live pages of our website to get link juice from those backlinks. All those links are related to us (anyhow once they are linking to our website). Then our website after receiving those back-links has dropped. It dropped about 7 positions in second page, which we never seen. What penalty it might be?

Will 301 redirect will have immediate impact once the website or that redirected link got indexed?

We have recently redirected few links in the process of link reclamation and ranking dropped few days later. Every link we claimed is related to our topic (matched in content and URL) and they have good DA. Even though why it has happened? What are the general rank dropping factors in the process of link reclamation?

Thanks,

Satish

Hi GR,

ahrefs.com toll helped in link reclamation or link building. However I have noticed that the tool is not able to find all the broken internal or external links. But I was able to find some broken links on another website. ahrefs support team responded to my query on this and agreed that tool might not be listing all links. They even said, no tool can provide all tools and its merely next to impossible. I wanna let you know my experience to keep you updated, so posting here.

Thanks,

Satish

Thanks GR.

I have gone through the Moz article on 301 redirects. They say that every redirect comes with certain amount of SEO risk. What exactly it might be?

And everybody say that we must redirect to relevant page. I can understand that 2 pages content must be relevant, but what's the importance of URL here? Do we need a match in URL keywords too? Because, if a non-existing link is redirected to existing page, what will be the metrics to pass link juice or any risk as there will be no content in one of these pages and how bots check? Like for below example:

website.com/folder/page1/content/ is a non-existing page and if it's redirected to website.com or website.com/folder2/page14.

Thanks,

Satish

We have many incoming links to a non existing pages of a sub-domain, which we are planning to take down or redirect to a sub-directory. But we are not ready to loose pagerank or link juice as many links of this sub-domain are referred from different external links. It's going to be double redirect obviously. What is the best thing we can go to reclaim these links without loss of link juice or PR?

Can we redirect all these links to same sub-domain and redirect the same sub-domain to sub-directory? Will this double redirect works?

Or

Can we redirect all these links to same sub-domain and ask visitors to visit sub-directory, manual redirection? How fair to manually redirect visitors?

Any other options?

Thanks,

Satish

Thanks for the suggestions GR. That gives us an idea to proceed on.

We are also planning to move all the links from one subdirectory to another subdirectory. But we will be redirecting them to related pages.

For example,         website.com/folder1/seo-changes to website.com/folder2/seo-changes

Only sub directory gonna change. But we have many links pointing to sub directory we are directing. Do the same link juice passes to these links redirected to another sub directory?

Hi,

We don't have most important keyword of our industry in our domain or sub-domain. How important it is to have keyword in website URL? Most of our competitors pages with "keyword" urls been listing in SERP. What is back-links role in this scenarion? And which URL have more advantage? keyword in sub-domain or page with keyword. Like for "seo" keyword.....  seo.example.com or example.com/seo

Thanks a lot. This is exactly what we are looking for.

Hi,

Our website has many broken links/non-existing pages. But there might be many backlinks for such non-existing pages. We want to find-out all such backlinks pointing to our non-existing pages (404). All the tools I tried so far including Moz OSE have been listing only backlinks for current existing pages. So please guide me how to find the backlinks we are looking for.

Thanks,

Moz member