I am redesigning a site in ASP.NET MVC and as a consequence every page will have a new URL. I'm going to implement 301 permanent redirects from the old pages to the new. I'm wondering if doing this for thousands of pages all at once will have a negative effect on SEO. What about hundreds of thousands?
A:
It is hard to judge how these redirects will impact SEO. Perhaps making a clean break is an option?
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David McDonald
2009-06-05 00:03:48
+7
A:
Although I don't think anyone can say categorically how it affects the search rankings without knowing the exact algorithms that the big guys use, I can tell you my experience. About three years ago we changed our URL format on a site that gets pretty decent traffic and provided 301's from the old URL's and we didn't see any impact. The new URL's began climbing the search rankings pretty quickly.
If we were penalized at all, the advantage to switching the URL format heavily outweighed any penalty. Our #1 traffic driving search remained in the top spot after the switch, and traffic climbed for it as well.
All in all we had about 6000 URL's that made the switch. Probably about 2000 of them had been indexed by Google before the switch (we could never get it to (as far as we could tell) index the other ones). Now we're up to about 5000 indexed URL's, but for all we know Google just doesn't tell us that it's done them all.
Short answer is that we didn't notice any penalty. But again, this was about three years ago.
womp
2009-06-05 00:34:03
Yep, as far as I know you don't get penalized. But if you are doing more than one redirect the search engine will give up and not index the page. So as long as you're just keeping it to one redirect, you should be fine.
Charlino
2009-06-05 00:38:27
As womp says, eventually your 301 URLs will fall out of the search index as the search engines learn that they should be indexing the new URLs and forgetting about the new one's. It's the only possible course of action and is using the technology (a 301 redirect) correctly to say a page has moved.
Greg B
2009-06-05 07:17:58
+4
A:
Here's google's official webmaster site on redirecting a site: Best practices when moving your site which covers their use of 301s.
If you want to know more about 301 or 302 there's also Matt Cutts (Google's SEO/Search guy) on SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects. This is from 2006 but still valid.
dajobe
2009-06-05 02:54:56
+3
A:
So long as you aren't chaining 301 requests, both Matt Cutts (from Google) and Rand Fishkin (a SEO expert out of Seattle) have said that 301 is not negative to your rank and, experimentally, perform much better than 300 redirects.
Nolte Burke
2009-06-05 03:19:24
A:
It is hard to tell bad or good to SEO unless we know SEs algorithms. However, from my experience and couple with my judgment, implement 301 permanent redirects is not so nagitive as you worry about! To be sure, it will be great if you do not use it since 301 redirects is not good to SE robots.
Weighing your situation, I recommend you use it. Remember, even if 301 permanent redirect harms you SEO, its damage is so little that you can ignore it
cheers
tag
2009-06-05 07:14:38