Redirects and SEO

[swiftmed]

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?

[John@Kapoo]

Simply, if the content isn't on those pages and you are just going to redirect, I don't think you have much hope for the next time they get crawled by search engines... It sounds like you want those pages to be indexed well for search engines still, but not have anything there, just redirect to home page? If that's what you're on about, then don't expect a good out come for future SEO stats for those pages in concern.

No possibility of just keeping the content on those pages AND include redirect link?

[Twey]

If you've used a proper HTTP redirect, Google will follow it too. I'm no expert here, but insofar as I know, it won't have an adverse effect.

[mwinter]

I just read in an article over at site-refernce that redirects is a bad thing for SEO.

It may depend on what sort of 'redirect' was under discussion. As Twey said, HTTP redirects (responses with a 3xx status code) shouldn't affect rankings as it's a core protocol feature and a ridiculous thing to penalise.

A scripted redirect (using the location object) will be heavily penalised: search engines don't execute client-side scripts, so they simply won't follow it.

A 'meta redirect' may also have an adverse affect. It's all too easy to write gateway pages to unrelated content. That is, the document containing the 'redirect' is packed full of keywords that searchers might find interesting. However, the document that the redirect goes to may have nothing to do with those keywords. It is far easier to treat that redirect as something questionable, than to retrieve both documents and compare their contents.

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,

If those documents no longer exist, then you can't reasonably expect users to be attracted to your site based on them, can you? If they're searching for that content, but it's not there any longer, why should they go to you?

If you mean that the documents have moved, then you should ideally redirect to the new locations. You should also consider planning your site better: URIs should never change.

i have used the redirects feature in CPanel to redirect users to my home page so that people arnt getting 404 errors

A 404 error is a useful thing. It lets the user (and user agents) know that what they were looking for can't be found in that location and that they might want to check for spelling mistakes, or use the site's search facility (if it has one) to find the real location.

Dumping the user at your home page is likely to lead to confusion, and perhaps even lost visitors. By receiving what looks like a real result, they'll go about looking for the reason why they came to your site. However, after a lot of wasted time they'll discover it's not there. They'll either be annoyed and leave, or still be annoyed but start trawling through hoping to actually find it.

A 404 error needn't look plain and off-putting, but it should still clearly be an error (including a real 404 response code).

Mike