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Noah
Noah
Jan 19, 2025, 11:08 AM
Forwarded from another channel:
Forwarded thread from another channel:
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 1:50 PM
I have a client dead set on 301 redirects being bad for page load time, slowing indexation, and providing poor ux. I'm recommending they add a subfolder to their blog URLs to better organize their blog content. The digital marketing manager is fighting me on implementing 80 redirects. Their blog posts currently drive very little traffic to the site.
They agreed to add subfolders to their solutions/product pages, but for some reason, they're fighting over the blog URLs?
Tony McCreath
Tony McCreath
Oct 28, 2024, 1:58 PM
Adding redirects for no known benefit is an unnecessary risk.
If not all links to all the blog posts are found and changed, then users will get a slightly slower loading experience.
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 2:01 PM
Right - we have a list of all URLs on the site and have identified all blog content.
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 2:09 PM
I guess my thought is that the benefit outweighs the risk because they aren't risking any traffic. The benefit being better content organization for both crawlers and users
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 2:10 PM
my understanding was that 301s are not inherently bad for SEO or UX, when used and implemented correctly
Tony McCreath
Tony McCreath
Oct 28, 2024, 2:27 PM
If a user has to go through a 301 then loading will take a little longer. If a bot hits a 301 then it will delay when it gets around to crawl the real page.
Search engines will need to discover the new 301s, drop the page from the index, then later crawl the new destination, and add it to the index. Search traffic may drop for a while. If mistakes are made, maybe for a long time.
Users nor search engines care much about the structure of a URL. How your pages link to each other is far more important.
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Oct 28, 2024, 2:30 PM
I can see the URL architecture improvement helping with reporting, but I don't see a point for users or crawlers. That's just going to be link based and the structure of that doesn't really matter anymore like it used to.
The debt created by redirects that break over time is more of a concern to me than the short term server side (or user) performance hit unless the site gets a ton of traffic through URLs that get redirected where that level of impact has real potential for downside.
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 2:34 PM
I guess I was always under the impression that hundreds/thousands of redirects is what might cause a slow down/indexing issues, so, mass redirects.
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 2:37 PM
And the redirected URLs in question do not generate a ton of traffic. Collectively, 100 clicks in the last 30 days.
Anne Berlin
Anne Berlin
Oct 28, 2024, 2:59 PM
It sounds like the first order of business might be to delete or consolidate the blog posts, as folder structure or not, they arent doing much for the site. Get some wins with revisions and then maybe revisit url structure for topical authority and growth.
Kody Wirth
Kody Wirth
Oct 28, 2024, 3:20 PM
Do they currently have navigational pages these sub folders would be attached to?
Creating pages that group topics could improve discoverability for users. Along with Anne’s mention of auditing and updating that could breathe new life into these pages.
But you wouldn’t have to change the URL structure of the blog pages to get that benefit.
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Emily Dougherty (Yost)
Oct 28, 2024, 3:21 PM
they currently have a page. When you click in-to a post, it goes to .

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