It's necessary to correct links to 301 pages?

[markovald]

That's my situation:
For a client site, i have 20 301 pages. It's just a small change from www.site.com/page that redirect to www.site.com/page/

For every 301 page, i have an average of 10 links that point to the old url.

It's important to change those links? I can't to it myself and i will be very boring for my customer to correct 200 links.

Thank you for your attention!

[dipper]

301 in your htaccess/nginx configuration and change the top 25-50 referring pages links if you can - else, don't worry too much as it's the same domain, just with/without slash - authority is not diminished.

Here is the Google guide on it: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au...]

[lucy24]

www.site.com/page that redirect to www.site.com/page/

Is that literally the only difference? Missing or present final slash?

I doubt search engines would even see this as a meaningful redirect, since it's exactly what would happen if /page were a real, physical directory, and it's one of the world's easiest typos. I recently had to contract a directory site and say Oops, err, when I said "/directory/page" I meant to say "/directory/page/" and if I can't get it right myself, I can hardly expect others to do so.

While you're in there, make sure /page/index.html is getting properly redirected to /page/ alone. Search engines will ask for this form even if they have never seen it. And they will ask for /page even if they have never seen anything but /page/; that's why I don't believe this specific redirect can be very significant. They have no way of knowing if your URL represents a physical directory or a behind-the-scenes rewrite.

[Andy Langton]

Google are likely concerned with the idea that redirects might pass value when they shouldn't. For example:

- It's not a 'like for like' redirect (i.e. the content isn't the same and you're trying to consolidate value to an undeserving page)
- The page has been bought/stolen/manipulated (e.g you bought someone else's expired domain)

These sorts of criteria can sometimes needlessly punish innocent sites. For example, you change design and your templates are radically different, or even you have a listing of news articles on a page and these change between Googlebot visits. This is one of the reasons why updating links within your control is a good idea when your site moves URLs in any way.

In your specific example, lucy24 is quite right - it would be highly unusual for this to be an issue. Although Cool URIs are not supposed to change: [w3.org...] ;)

[tangor]

Those 10 links.... internal or external? If internal, correct those with search and replace. After all, it's only twenty pages with ten on each.

[lucy24]

i have an average of 10 links that point to the old url.

I now realize there are two ways to interpret this part. Are those 10 links elsewhere on your own site, or did you mean that you have an average of 10 links from assorted other sites pointing to each of those pages? Contacting a bunch of people at other sites can be a lot of bother; initially I assumed that was what you were asking. But there is no excuse for incorrect internal links on your own site. Any halfway competent text editor can do it globally with a few mouse clicks.

[markovald]

lucy24, sorry for the late reply. I mean internal links.

I want to avoid or al least reduce 301 redirects in my site.

Thank you for all your suggestions.

[Andy Langton]

It's best to avoid internal links redirecting. In cases like these, I certainly wouldn't suggest that a client do it. Depending on your site setup, and assuming some precautions were in place, you could do some find/replace to fix these. E.g.

Find
<a href="/page"
Replace
<a href="/page/"

How complex this is depends on the number of URLs affected, and how consistent the HTML used is. I've certainly done this in the past, however - for example to replace al http:// internal links with https:// versions. You do need to be careful about breaking things, though!

[iamlost]

Where at all possible it is best to avoid redirects. As many SEs including Google treat redirects as links each dampens value: eg. Instead of page -> link -> page with one damp factor you get page -> link -> redirect link -> page for two damp factors. So as far as SEO goes redirects are a valuable tool but with a cost that needs to be weighed.

[markovald]

Thank you all!

[nakkers]

I've done redirects before when I literally just redirect all the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new one with a small .htaccess code, and my rankings are just fine.

[lucy24]

redirect all the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new one

I bet the human users love that.

[Robert Charlton]

I've done redirects before when I literally just redirect all the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new one with a small .htaccess code, and my rankings are just fine.

Very bad advice, and I emphatically suggest you not try this. Google, in many different ways, specifically recommends against blanket redirects to home. As lucy24 mentions, it's a bad user experience. In most cases, such redirects are also likely to be seen as a irrelevant redirects, and perhaps as attempts to manipulate PageRank. The practice is also much more likely to hurt you than help.

The suggestion also does not apply in this situation... and in fact it would be much more work than the find and replace routine which Andy_Langton suggests. Andy is also absolutely correct that one should also "avoid internal links redirecting".

So, in answer to the (now clarified) question, is it necessary to correct links to 301 pages, the answer is yes. You must in this situation either change or remove the incorrect internal links (in addition to the 301 redirects which you'll still want to have in case of external inbounds). It's the only approach I'd recommend.