Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : Should I use a 301 redirect on thousands of pages?

[lexington]

I know that a 301 redirect is the best way to let search engines know that you have permanently redirected your site. For over 6 years I have had these same pages the same and was thinking about using a 301 redirect in my htaccess file and rename the whole site directory. I suppose that is ok even though I am dealing with 100,000+ pages? Basically when I first created the site I used the phpBB2 directory and placed everything in it but I want to rename that directory to "site" or something now. Thanks.

[lexington]

Anyone? Thanks.

[Corey Bryant]

If your pages are indexed by the search engines, I would think that you should use the 301 re-direct, but thousands of pages - there might be something else there.

[incrediblehelp]

Why not focus on 301 redirecting all of the ones that actually deliver traffic?

[grace5]

you must remember also that using the 301 redirect (is the correct way to go) that placing 100,000 enteries into your .htaccess file
will make your site as fast as a dead slug.
You really need to talk with and Apache/.htaccess man before you attempt that.
I just change the urls on a site only about 25 pages and redirected using the 301redirect,I had several visitors everyday,.but now after the redirect,traffic has fell off to almost nill.Maybe it will pick back up...?

[snapshot]

In either case, there might be some time before the new pages are indexed and the search engines fully get aware of the new site.

[Melnel]

You don't have to 301 redirect each page individually. You can either put a php redirect in the .htaccess file that redirects http://www.yoururl.com/oldirectory to http://wwwyoururl.com/newdirectory

or you can use a mod_rewrite statement

[lexington]

Yeah I plan to use mod_rewrite to do a whole directory I wasn't planning on doing each one individually I just wanted to make sure it was common for basically a whole site to change a popular directory that has been spidered for years.

[Teoman]

Well you should do the 301 redirect speculation though i bet your loosing allot of traffic in waste. But if there is traffic wasted and the pages are indexed many years. Changing the directories would give you major loss on the traffic of your website. I advice to put landing pages redirecting to your homepage. So it wont effect your traffic and convert it to targeted traffic.

[Melnel]

There is no reason you should lose any traffic or pages indexed though it may take a while for all the changes to come into effect. As for landing pages just what is that supposed to do? New pages that have never been indexed are supposed to help???

[Teoman]

Melnel,

In small period he will loose traffic cause the sites that are indexed will change directories. So this will get it de-indexed the meta is not gone but the old directory is gone. After the time frame passes it will return back to normal as it used to be. The landing pages option. Well think of a page where traffic from the search engine comes to www.domain.com/newoffer.html

IT was a new offer but the long time ago and the offer expired so the traffic is useless. So to regain the loss of the traffic the expired pages should return to the home page www.domain.com/home.html

I hope you understand what i mean.

[Melnel]

ALL the traffic from links to the old pages that are indexed will be passed to the new directory de-indexing exactly nothing. The traffic will either come from the old pages still indexed (which are redirected to the new pages) or it will come from the new pages as they are indexed and only when the new pages are indexed will the old pages drop out.

What the @#$%^ is this talk about a new offer?