Pages currently in index, but I want them redirected

How will Google handle this scenario?

[srvdt]

I have a handful of pages:

one.html
two.html
three.html

that are currently in the main Google index which I have placed meta tags for robots not to index anymore since I updated my site structure like so:

20030201/one.html
20030201/two.html
20030201/three.html

Now instead, I decided to redirect users to those files at their proper location with an .htaccess Redirect command.

When Google crawls my site at one.html (and is then transferred to 20030201/one.html) is it smart enough to realize it's not on one.html anymore and hence drop it from the index next time around or should I leave my original files (actually duplicates) in place for one more cycle with the NOINDEX tags?

Thanks for any input!

[EasyCall]

Yes, Google handles 301 redirects very well and will drop the old pages out of the index. No need to leave them in place.

[srvdt]

Thanks for the help!

[chrisandsarah]

I've done a few 301 redirects on my site too, to duplicate pages and left the old pages up because they are in google. Do i need to to put NOINDEX in the old pages? or will google not reindex them anyway because they have got 301's?
I dont want to get penalised for duplicates

[jdMorgan]

chrisandsarah,

Install a 301-Removed Permanently redirect in httpd.conf or .htaccess, and then you are free to remove the old file and replace it with the newly-named version. The redirect will be invoked before any access is made to your server's file system, and Google will never "see" the old file (filename) again. Googlebot will ask for it, the 301 server response will tell it that the page has moved and provide the new URL, and then Googlebot will ask for it again by that new name in a second request.

There is no risk of a duplicate content penalty because there is no duplicate content; even if both files still exists, Googlebot cannot access the old filename if it has been redirected.

<added>Since the 301 redirect will also affect any visitor's browser in the same way described above, it is perfectly safe to remove the old files - As long as you have checked that the 301 response is working properly (I recommend the server header checker here in the stickymail navigation bar).</added>

HTH,
Jim

[chrisandsarah]

Hi. This is how i've done my redirects:

redirect 301 /olddirectory/file1.html [mydomain...]
redirect 301 /olddirectory/file2.html [mydomain...]
and so on and so on. it redirects around 20 files.

I have no other commands in my .htaccess.
How do i do the Removed Permanently? or will it be ok the way ive done it. I was going to wait until google listed my files in their new directory structure, and then delete the old ones.

Thanks,
chrisandsarah

[hetzeld]

ChrisandSarah,

I could be wrong but I remember having read somewhere that the "redirect 301" was obsolete and that the new "RedirectPermanent" was preferred.

So , instead of:
redirect 301 /olddirectory/file1.html [mydomain...]

you should use:
RedirectPermanent /olddirectory/file1.html [mydomain...]

The last format is automatically returning the 301 header, of course ;)

Dan

<edit>
The Apache documentation states that RedirectPermanent is provided for NCSA compatibility
The three forms:
Redirect 301
Redirect Permanent
RedirectPermanent
are equivalent
</edit>

[jdMorgan]

chrisandsarah,

My mistake - It's actually just 301-Moved Permanently, not 301-Removed Permanently <blush>... Late night, er typo, uh, lost my concentration... Doh!

Once you have installed the Redirects, you can delete the old files - plain and simple. With the Redirects in place, the old files are no longer reachable from the 'net. Any request for an old file gets redirected to the new one. This applies to Google and human visitors, including you. The only way these old files can be seen is by using a non-http protocol - such as ftp - which is not affected by http redirects. Since search engines don't use http to spider, you can safely delete the old files the minute your redirects are in place.

Jim

[chrisandsarah]

Thanks for all your help. I'll be deleting the old files now, which will ensure i dont get penalised for duplicate pages. thanks everyone

[getvisibleuk]

ok - but how do you put in a 301 into a html page?

[cchooper]

Umm ... you don't, that's the whole point of them - that HTML page no longer exists :)

You install it for when you move a page, say ...

www.domain.tld/old/location/page.htm
to
www.domain.tld/new/location/page.htm

or wherever else you want it. you can't put that in the HTML file because google will go looking for the one in /old/location/, and you setup the server to provide the redirect

now here's a question: would one benefit from modifying the expected 404 response, where a 301 redirect is sent instead?

ie: if somefile.htm doesn't exist, instead of sending the dreaded and annoying 404, do a 301 redirect to the index page, or another relevant page.

[chrisandsarah]

is it possible to move a whole directory at a time with a single redirect? for example if i had 100 folders and files in a directory called widget, and i wanted to move the lot to a directory called newwidgetdirectory, could i do this:

redirect permanent /widgets/ [mydomain...]