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.
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
-
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages.
Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors.
Any feedback would be much appreciated.
-
I think one thing you should keep in mind is that 301 is meant for content being moved. In other words moving one page from one site to another, or from one path to another, without changing the content of the page. If you move a page you use 301, google see the change and discount a small portion of the page juice (1%? 5%? no one knows exactly) but pass the vast majority to the same page on the new location.
But... Once upon a time a popular black hat technique was to get control of a page (actually many pages, as many as they could) with a good juice and do a 301 redirect to another page, a target page, to just pass juice.
So... Google, wearing its shining armor, decided to fight back, and changed their algorithm to penalize that, in other words if you do a 301 redirect from one page with a certain content to another page with a totally different content, google notes that, doesn't like it, and penalize the ranking of the target page.
Exactly how much of the two page content should stay the same to pass google antispam rules nobody knows, you can find out running some tests, my guess is probably it's also very specific to the page, domain, authority, etc...
I heard, but I never tested myself, than if you do a 301 redirect from one page on a domain or path, to the same page on a different domain or path, and slowly in the following months you change the content of the target page till it's completely different from the original, Google won't penalize you.
-
Hi Rosemary
I've run into this problem several times before on sites with blog postings and events that have piled up but are useless to the current site. If the pages for these events are getting traffic and have good value, I would redirect them to a relevant page so that you do not lose your link juice. However, if the pages are duplicates and don't have much value, I would delete them entirely and let them go to a 404. Google eventually will stop crawling 404s so it is ok to remove old/irrelevant content. You will see a spike in your Moz crawl errors because of the increase in 404s. But 404s are better than duplicate content and duplicate meta descriptions. To improve user experience, you can create a 404 that is engaging…such as with a search box or with links your most popular pages.
Hope that helps!
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
-
How to update Schema markup code to all pages of my website ?
Hi all i have a website with 1k+ pages and i have schema markup code for reviews and FAQ's, so need help in knowing how to update code for all pages in one go without using tag manager as updating to all pages manually is similar to impossible, let me know is there any way out to achieve the results and my website is built on word-press, awaiting for earliest reply......... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atiagr1232 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
Set Placeholder Page ASAP or Wait For Full Website?
It can take some time for a new business website to get picked up by all the search engines and indexed. Let's assume it's going to take a month to build your new full-fledged business website. Would it be advantageous in the mean time to immediately launch the domain with an introductory website using a template site so you might have just two pages, a home page with logo, title, brief description of pages, a couple images, etc and a contact page. Would this help give the site a "jump start" on being indexed? Or could that do more harm than good by putting up something "quick & dirty" versus the complete website with much more content, that has been SEO optimized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault741 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0