Redirects and SEO

He has: 59 posts

Joined: Mar 2006

Hello friends,

I just read in an article over at site-refernce that redirects is a bad thing for SEO. What i want to know is i have many pages that used to be indexed really well with good incoming links which no longer exist, i have used the redirects feature in CPanel to redirect users to my home page so that people arnt getting 404 errors,

If this is a bad thing to do, what can i do?

Kind Regards,
Andy MacDonald

JeevesBond's picture

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

I think the best thing to do from an SEO perspective is keep the original pages there. Redirects are good from a usability perspective, but not as good as the mantra: "A cool URI is one which does not change." *

Alternatively you can just work on getting those new pages indexed instead, don't think there's a quick fix for this one. Sad

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* Yoda - whilst trying to navigate the Microscoff site - reportedly said: "URI's! Change they should not!" **

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** I made this up

a Padded Cell our articles site!

He has: 59 posts

Joined: Mar 2006

Ok mate, thats all i needed to know. cheers dude.

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Jun 2004

Yeah, its best to try to keep pages, once I deleted a few hundred pages and put a 404 redirect to homepage and the site got dumped by google. I'd steer clear of redirects, although google is happy with server redirects, but you have to know exactly what your doing. If youve got pages indexed why delete them ?

Wholesale Suppliers
Wholesale and Dropship Directory

He has: 30 posts

Joined: Sep 2005

If redirects are the only option, the best SE friendly way to do it is with 301 Permanent Redirects, through .htaccess. But, like starguru said, if you've got pages indexed why delete them?

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