Removing or redirecting content is a common decision that a content manager, SEO manager or specialist, or webmaster must make. You may delete it with no redirect (404), permanently remove it (410), temporarily redirect it (302, 307), or permanently redirect it (301).
Setting up a 301 permanent redirect is most common–if not considered standard amongst the SEO community. A 301 redirect is the technical way of telling the user and Google crawler that the URL is old and the user should be sent to a different page instead.
Ryan Jones of Search Engine Land covered 301 redirects extensively and like many others, recommends setting up 301 redirects on all URLs that should be shown to a more recent page instead.
Do I Think a 301 Redirect Should Be Standard?
I agree that using a 301 redirect should be standard, though the supporting data is hard to come by.
I’m a very data-oriented, growth, and results-driven person, so I like sharing advice with supporting data whenever I can.
Despite advising the standard of setting up redirects, not many show or follow up with data to support their recommendations. So, how do we really know?
My Data With a Recent 301 Redirect Campaign
The truth is Google will follow redirects and will pass some “value” through them.
– Ryan Jones, Search Engine Land
In my experience, setting up a redirect does not always mean better results for the new campaign. If the old URLs have solid backlinks, it does appear to pass the traffic along accordingly, but when it’s a few orphaned or outdated pages that barely convert or rank, it doesn’t appear to make that much of a difference on the new campaign (or at least right away).
This led me to have zero expectations that a recent 301 redirect would make a difference in my data reporting.
To my surprise, within a week, I noticed the new page began ranking for transactional long tail keywords and gained a greater amount of average impressions than the older pages combined.
Here’s my data:
Data from Outdated, Redirected Content
Two pages were redirected to the new page, and neither had any backlinks pointing to them. Below is the Google Search Console data showing the negligible amount of impressions these pages were getting, along with the drop off coinciding with the redirects placed about 6 days earlier.
The pages were redirected on May 16 and as you can see, impressions and traffic dropped on May 22.
Resulting Data on the New Page and Campaign
The new page was published May 16 and quickly picked up impressions for transactional long-tail keywords May 28 (about 6 days later). Here’s the data on that:
Combining the average impressions of the older pages, this new content is already 51.9% more visible on Google, especially for the transactional long tail keywords that we want to rank for.
I still want to see how this page is doing in 3-6 months from now and convert on some organic traffic, but hey, for just about two weeks, I’ll take it. It’s always nice when you can see some short term results from Google and continue to trust standard SEO wisdom.
