Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
-
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs?
The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
-
If you have access to the .htaccess file on your server you can use this website http://www.htaccessredirect.net/ to generate content for it. The redirect directory should do it.
If not the you can use php to create a 301 redirect like so
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.New-Website.com/test.php");?>and the final option would be to email your hosting company and ask them to do it.
-
Hi Keri! This will all be done in WordPress.
-
What blog platform are you using? That'll help us provide a more specific answer. Thanks!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp0 -
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0 -
Wildcard Redirects & Canonical Tags
I have an interesting situation. Current URLs Example1: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NakulGoyal
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html Current URLs Example2: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html Current URLs Example3: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html New URL:
www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html I want to make sure all variations of the above URL redirect to the new URLs. However, as you see in Example 3, we are dealing with variables that are passed on. (+5 in this case). Question 1: What wildcard 301 redirect / regular expression can I use to tackle these ? Question 2: If we redirect www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html to www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html and www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html contains the canonical tag www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html, any concerns or red flags here ?0 -
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!9