301 redirects and Developer -
I have a problem that I hope you may be able to help me with.
Our site is currently has 100's of old urls that have been indexed giving me two problems - duplicate content for some and for older ones 404 pages.
To date I have been getting our developer to do 301 redirects on these pages. But he is now saying that this is not efficient and that due to the quantity I am slowing the site down. Also its not recommended to have as many 301’s on the site as this can effect the performance of the site in general. Is this correct ?
He says that I should not focus on individual pages but only problems at the top level domain.e.g mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com. However these individual pages are important and have been indexed.What should i do?
Have you come across this problem - they developed the site with no seo in mind and this is the consequence of their development.
I would love to hear your advice and experience
greg posted this at 12:02 — 7th March 2009.
He has: 1,558 posts
Joined: Nov 2005
I cannot comment on your developers comments and abilities as I don't know your full site setup, pages, code and other surrounding issues. It would be unfair to agree or disagree with him/her without being in the position myself.
It's easy for someone to come along and say "yeah., they are talking rubbish...all you need to do is..."
That said, the old indexed pages will be removed eventually by search engines if you take down the redirect and just allow the new pages to be indexed again (or index no page if page is removed altogether).
You can assist the main one - Google - by using their webmaster tools and telling them to remove certain sites/pages/urls etc.
I think you can provide a new one for removed ones too (uncertain), at the least you can request a re-crawl.
And submit a site map at any time to them, which I have found really helps. even with new sites with little content they eventually use the site map and crawl your site with accurate results.
But either way, it sounds like a semi-catastrophic setup, and a nightmare to keep tabs on. It really needs to be cleaned up, for search engines sake, site visitors and your's and your developer's sanity.
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pr0gr4mm3r posted this at 18:01 — 7th March 2009.
He has: 1,505 posts
Joined: Sep 2006
When I switched blogging platforms on one of my sites, I was left with a ton of broken links. For reasons beyond me, search engines take forever to update. My .htaccess file has several dozen redirects - one for every article, category, and tag. It doesn't slow down my site or affect my ranking.
I can't say for sure whether or not it would scale to several hundred, but I can't see why not.
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Zaccaria posted this at 18:22 — 18th March 2009.
They have: 32 posts
Joined: Nov 2008
Our site is currently has 100's of old urls that have been indexed giving me two problems - duplicate content for some and for older ones 404 pages.
To date I have been getting our developer to do 301 redirects on these pages. But he is now saying that this is not efficient and that due to the quantity I am slowing the site down. Also its not recommended to have as many 301’s on the site as this can effect the performance of the site in general. Is this correct ?
He says that I should not focus on individual pages but only problems at the top level domain.e.g mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com. However these individual pages are important and have been indexed.What should i do?
Have you come across this problem - they developed the site with no seo in mind and this is the consequence of their development.
I would love to hear your advice and experience
Update the links as needed and focus on your landing page(s) as well as your Top Level.
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TechBlog posted this at 05:39 — 7th April 2009.
They have: 10 posts
Joined: Apr 2009
301 redirects are supposed to be safe with google as far as i know
gofe posted this at 07:04 — 15th April 2009.
They have: 4 posts
Joined: Apr 2009
useful information from google about 301 redirect
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
Megan posted this at 13:29 — 15th April 2009.
She has: 11,282 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I don't know anything about whether that many 301's would slow it down. Try taking out the .htaccess and see if there's a difference.
I don't agree with this. If you have individual pages that are ranking well and have inbound links then you definitely need to 301 those URLs. Pages that don't have inbound links and/or don't rank all that well you could probably leave and let Google figure out over time.
I would probably focus on the inbound links. That's where you're really going to lose a lot because if you don't 301 them you lose all that link juice.
Eventually the search engines will drop all your old URLs and you can take out the redirects unless they have links pointing to them.
Megan
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Greg K posted this at 03:47 — 16th April 2009.
He has: 1,995 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
We have an excellent SEO department at work that really knows their stuff. We do multiple 301's when a site is redesigned. Our site I think had about 100 entries, so if they ok it, I trust it is effective and worth any possible effect it may have (although I doubt much)
-Greg
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