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.
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
-
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
-
If they were recently randomly generated by some errand code, you can let them die and 404. The only time you want to redirect a page to another is if that page 1) is getting traffic or 2) has backlinks. Since you're dealing with a code error, those two are very unlikely and you can be confident in just killing the pages.
-
I would also say you can also disavow those links to google - would take a good amount of your time though.
-
If you search on youtube you may find a video of Matt Cutts where he is saying redirect a million url overnight to the same page would rise a flag in the anti-spam team and lead to a manual review. If you have nothing to fear and you believe your redirects are legit you don't necessarily have to be scared.
But if the links are due to a bug, I guess they have no juice to pass, so why redirect?
-
Hi anirbandas,
10 million are a lot of pages ... First of all, still researching and double check to see which is the intent of these links.
You can do any of the options that you have been recommended above, or monitor these links and if you see something strange disavow tool using Google.
Good luck
-
I would throw HTTP 410s for them all if they don't get traffic. 410 carries a little bit more weight than 404s and we're not talking about a small number of pages here. I wouldn't redirect them to the homepage as you'll almost certainly get a ton of "soft 404s" in WMT if done all at once.
Matt Cutts on 404 vs 410: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5Nf8ANfOw
If they are getting traffic, then it'll be a harder job to unpick the pages that have value.
George
-
If for any reason you are seeing traffic flow to these pages then i would redirect if possible.
-
I would go 404's (and let them die) as I dont think those have any good content on them since it was just generated.
Redirecting them wont really do much.
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
-
Best redirect destination for 18k highly-linked pages
Technical SEO question regarding redirects; I appreciate any insights on best way to handle. Situation: We're decommissioning several major content sections on a website, comprising ~18k webpages. This is a well established site (10+ years) and many of the pages within these sections have high-quality inbound links from .orgs and .edus. Challenge: We're trying to determine the best place to redirect these 18k pages. For user experience, we believe best option is the homepage, which has a statement about the changes to the site and links to the most important remaining sections of the site. It's also the most important page on site, so the bolster of 301 redirected links doesn't seem bad. However, someone on our team is concerned that that many new redirected pages and links going to our homepage will trigger a negative SEO flag for the homepage, and recommends instead that they all go to our custom 404 page (which also includes links to important remaining sections). What's the right approach here to preserve remaining SEO value of these soon-to-be-redirected pages without triggering Google penalties?
Technical SEO | | davidvogel1 -
My homepage redirects to itself?
Hi there - I'm not a SEO so help would be appreciated! Moz is telling me we have a redirect loop but the URLs are the same. https://www.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/ Why is my homepage creating a redirect loop to itself? We use Wordpress and I do not have any redirects listed for our homepage. Could this have something to do with switching to https in April? Thanks, Katherine
Technical SEO | | kmmartin0 -
Getting rid of pagination - redirect all paginated pages or leave them to 404?
Hi all, We're currently in the process of updating our website and we've agreed that one of the things we want to do is get rid of all our pagination (currently used on the blog and product review areas) and instead implement load more on scroll. The question I have is... should we redirect all of the paginated pages and if so, where to? (My initial thoughts were either to the blog homepage or to the archive page) OR do we leave them to just 404? Bear in mind we have thousands of paginated pages 😕 Here's our blog area btw - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/blog Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
TalkInThePark0 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0