Does redirecting old site's URLs to new site's front page hurt a page's ranking?

Posted by Kaivosukeltaja on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Kaivosukeltaja
Published on 2011-09-27T09:41:26Z Indexed on 2011/11/14 2:06 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 265

Filed under:

redirects

|

301-redirect

|

page-ranking

An old site that is being rewritten needs to have it's URLs redirected to the new site. There are a few hundred pages that may or may not have corresponding pages on the new site, probably with different slugs, and adding mappings manually will require more hours than we can spare.

It was suggested that all old URLs be redirected to the new front page, but I remember reading somewhere that this confers a penalty in page rank because it's what link farmers do. Is this true or can we take the easy way out?

© Pro Webmasters or respective owner

Related posts about redirects

.htaccess: Redirect Hotlink Flash --> Site with embed Flash

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
I have some .php sites that embeds .swf files. These .swf files are now linked to by some other guys. And I don't want them to simply open the SWF, I want them to force being redirect to the page where the flash is embed. Data: Site: www.example.com/1 (www.example.com/2, www.example.com/3 and so… >>> More
how to fix: www.domain.com redirected to domain.com

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
Hi this website livingalignment.com is very slow to load. The domain and hosting is all with go daddy. In pingdom I found that it is redirecting from www.livingalignment.com to livingalignment.com and it takes about 2 seconds to do so. you can see that here taking about 10 seconds when I entered… >>> More
301 rewrite loop with a lowercase URL rule and a URL slug rule [on hold]

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
I need to do a 301 rewrite to force all urls to become lowercase. I put in .htaccess (RewriteMap lc int:tolower in httpd.conf): RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] RewriteRule . ${lc:{REQUEST_URI}} [R=301,L] Everything works just fine except to urls with subcategories which in this case are: /category-1256-Product-page-example… >>> More
Nice wordpress to wordpress redirect?

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
Hi, I have a wordpress blog in http://suportrecerca.barcelonamedia.org/blog/ , and since I can no longer use our company servers for my blog I've had to move it to blog.joanmarcriera.es Google had my old blog well indexed and many people is landing to my old blog. I want to redirect this people… >>> More
Seeking htaccess help: Converting multiple subdomains (both http and https) to www.domain.com using .htaccess

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
I've been trying to get an answer to this question on other forums (the folks at SuperUser thought this was the place I needed to post) and via my connections, but I haven't gotten very far. Hopefully you guys can help me find an answer: I've got a dozen old subdomains that have been indexed by Google… >>> More

Related posts about 301-redirect

.htaccess file size causes 500 Internal Server Error

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
As soon as my .htaccess goes over approx 8410 bytes, I get a 500 Internal Server Error. I don't think this is due to a bad redirect, as I have experimented with redirects in the .htaccess and then with just text that is commented out #. (no actual commands in the .htaccess file) Is there anything… >>> More
Apache 301 redirect

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have inherited a server with a couple of domains on it. The website was reworked within the last two years and I am trying to oblige a request by staff to get a redirect to work properly (if it can given the default structure). So right now on the server I have a redirect that takes every 301 and… >>> More
Sitewide 301 Redirect with a subset of different redirects

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am trying to make a sitewide 301 redirect for a site with around 400 pages but also have a subset of about 10 individual pages that don't follow the sitewide redirect and should point somewhere else. Any ideas how to format such redirect rules so the sitewide redirect doesnt conflict with the… >>> More
301 Redirect and query strings

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am looking to create a 301 redirect based purely on a query string see b OLD URL: olddomain.com/?pc=/product/9999 New URL: newurl.php?var=yup My normal way of doing this would be redirect 301 pc=/product/9999 newurl.php?var=yup But this time I am trying to match a URL that that only contains… >>> More
.htaccess 301 redirect without GET var

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, For a website I'm currently working on we're redirecting our old URL's permanently to new ones like this: Redirect 301 /oldfile.php http://www.site.com/show/newurl Now I come across this situation in which the old url has a get var like: Redirect 301 /oldfile.php?var=name http://www.site.com/show/newurl This… >>> More