Multiple 301 Redirects after restyling a website (SEO)

Question

We have updated our site recently; the old one had around 300 pages... the new one about 80 ;)

This because in the old structure we had, for every argument, many pages. Instead, now we have just one page with a 'summary'.

For example, the old structure about the 'car' argument was:

1. Main page, 'cars'
2. sub-page, 'tires'
3. sub-page, 'engines'
4. sub pages, 'accessories'
5. etc...

Now, we have just 1 page 'cars', with all inside.

Actually, I redirect all the sub-pages to the main one, with .htaccess 301 redirect:

Redirect 301 /cars-tires.php http://www.example.com/cars.php
Redirect 301 /cars-engines.php http://www.example.com/cars.php
Redirect 301 /cars-accessories.php http://www.example.com/cars.php

So we have many different (even if the main topic is the same) pages pointing on one page.

Do you think this is good for seo, or will be better redirect just the old main page and give a 404 not found to the old sub-pages?

Answer 1

It's much better to have the multiple 301s. You don't want your customers to see a 404.

There's no SEO penalty (that I'm aware of) for having multiple pages 301 to the same page.

Answer 2

301s are certainly better than dumping your customers with a 404. If you do what is genuinely best for a human user, you should find that a search engine will respect that.

Note that you can tidy up your .htaccess file by combining the directives into one:

RedirectMatch Permanent ^/cars-(tires|engines|accessories).php$ http://www.example.com/cars.php

or even a more generic

RedirectMatch Permanent ^/(.+)-(.+).php$ http://www.example.com/$1.php

if you have a lot of URLs in the form of /foo-bar.php that have to redirect to /foo.php