Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Mozscape API
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Competitive Research
      • Link Explorer
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Domain Analysis
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your All-In-One Suite of SEO Tools

        The essential SEO toolset: keyword research, link building, site audits, page optimization, rank tracking, reporting, and more.

        Learn more
        Try Moz Pro free
        Illustration of Moz Pro
      • Moz Local

        Complete Local SEO Management

        Raise your local SEO visibility with easy directory distribution, review management, listing updates, and more.

        Learn more
        Check my presence
        Illustration of Moz Local
      • STAT

        Enterprise Rank Tracking

        SERP tracking and analytics for SEO experts, STAT helps you stay competitive and agile with fresh insights.

        Learn more
        Book a demo
        Illustration of STAT
      • Mozscape API

        The Power of Moz Data via API

        Power your SEO with the proven, most accurate link metrics in the industry, powered by our index of trillions of links.

        Learn more
        Get connected
        Illustration of Mozscape API
      • Compare SEO Products
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Competitive Research

        Competitive Intelligence to Fuel Your SEO Strategy

        Gain intel on your top SERP competitors, keyword gaps, and content opportunities.

        Find competitors
        Illustration of Competitive Research
      • Link Explorer

        Powerful Backlink Data for SEO

        Explore our index of over 40 trillion links to find backlinks, anchor text, Domain Authority, spam score, and more.

        Get link data
        Illustration of Link Explorer
      • Keyword Explorer

        The One Keyword Research Tool for SEO Success

        Discover the best traffic-driving keywords for your site from our index of over 500 million real keywords.

        Search keywords
        Illustration of Keyword Explorer
      • Domain Analysis

        Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like Domain Authority, top pages, ranking keywords, and more.

        Analyze domain
        Illustration of Domain Analysis
      • MozBar

        Free, Instant SEO Metrics As You Surf

        Using Google Chrome, see top SEO metrics instantly for any website or search result as you browse the web.

        Try MozBar
        Illustration of MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

        Read the Beginner's Guide
      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

        See All SEO Guides
      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

        Visit the Learning Center
      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

        Explore the Catalog
      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

        View All Webinars
      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

        Find SEO Answers
      The Impact of Local Business Reviews
      SEO Industry Report

      The Impact of Local Business Reviews

      Learn more
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

        Grow Your Business
      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

        Read Our Story
      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

        Drive Client Success
      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

        See What's Possible
      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

        Scale Your SEO
      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

        See What’s New
      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature: Moz Pro

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Mozscape API
      • Mozscape API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

    Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

    Technical SEO
    3
    5
    3522
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Squall315
      Squall315 last edited by

      Hi, please someone help!

      We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy)

      So the question are:

      1. Can we conduct the action?

      2. If we cant, what's the reason?

      3. If we can, what would be the best practice?

      Thanks for help in advance!

      Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Squall315
        Squall315 @irvingw last edited by

        Thank you! Sorry for the late reply. It does help.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Squall315
          Squall315 @blacey last edited by

          Thanks!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • irvingw
            irvingw last edited by

            it depends on the PR of the site, if site A is a aged well established site with good PR that you want to be passed to site B then keep the 301s.

            If site B is a brand new site, understand that cancelling the 301 will negatively affect site B and if site A pages are still indexed and getting a lot of traffic you will lose that traffic.

            If you are creating a new site A, and the existing site A has good PR then your new site A will hit the ground running since it's aged, just 301 the pages internally to the new url structure so you don't 404 internal pages with PR.

            Squall315 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • blacey
              blacey last edited by

              For you to use Site A as its own entity again I would suggest cancelling the 301 redirect as you've said, creating all the pages for Site A, making sure they're optimised on-page with good internal links to the other pages,

              Once that's been done, generate an XML sitemap and submit that to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc

              Then its just a waiting game for the search engines to update their index with the new pages on Site A.

              Squall315 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              Browse Questions

              Explore more categories

              • Moz Tools

                Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

              • SEO Tactics

                Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

              • Community

                Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

              • Digital Marketing

                Chat about tactics outside of SEO

              • Research & Trends

                Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

              • Support

                Connect on product support and feature requests.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • HypermediaSystems

                Redirecting 301 or 302?

                Hi, I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think. My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication. 1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
                2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
                3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
                So my question is:
                A. Should we do it 301???
                B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side... Thank you so much for your help in advance...

                Technical SEO | | HypermediaSystems
                0
              • mozroadjan

                Google indexing staging / development site that is redirected...

                Hi Moz Fans! - Please help. We had a acme.stagingdomain.com while a site was in development, when it went live it redirected (302) to acmeprofessionalservices.com (real names redacted!!) no known external links to staging site although staging site url has been emailed from Google Apps(!!!) now found that staging site is in the index even though it redirects to the proper public site. and some (but not all) of the pages are in the index too. They all redirect to the proper public site when visited. It is convenient to have a redirect from the staging site to the new one for the team, Chrome etc. remember frequently visited sites. Be a shame to lose that. Yes, these pages can be removed using webmaster tools.
                But how did they get in the index to start with? And if we're building a new site, and a customer has an existing site is there a danger of duplicate content etc. penalties caused by the staging site? We had a similar incident recently when a PDF that was not linked anywhere on the site appeared in the index. The link had been emailed through Google Apps, and visited in Chrome, but that was it. So 3 questions. Why is the staging site still in the index despite the redirects? How did they get in the index in the first place? Will the new staging site affect the rank of the existing site, eg. duplicate content penalties?

                Technical SEO | | mozroadjan
                0
              • IceIcebaby

                301 Redirect Best Practices

                Hi SEOs, Question about ranking/redirects. If I have a particular page that is already ranking for a couple KWs in top SERPs, but know there are higher volume KWs I can optimize for should I just leave it as is or change the URL key and redirect for the time being until Google re-indexes. Example:
                current URL: www.example.com/action/best-movies
                new URL: www.example.com/action/best-action-movies
                (the current would be ranking for "best action moves" whereas the new would include the actual "best action movies" KW) Let me know if I can clarify, thank you!

                Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
                0
              • Cyberace

                .htaccess Redirect 301 issues

                I have completely rewritten my web site, adding structure to the file directories. Subsequently added was Redirect information within the .htaccess file. The following example ...
                Redirect 301 /armaflex.html http://www.just-insulation.com/002-brands/armaflex.html
                Returns this response in the URL bar of ... 
                http://www.just-insulation.com/002-brands/armaflex.html?file=armaflex
                I am at a loss to understand why the suffix "?file=armaflex" is added The following code is inserted at the top of the file ...
                RewriteEngine On redirect html pages to the root domain RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L] Force www. prefix in URLs and redirect non-www to www RewriteCond %{http_host} ^just-insulation.com [NC]
                RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.just-insulation.com/ [R=301,NC] Any advice would be most welcome.

                Technical SEO | | Cyberace
                0
              • ulefos

                Remove html file extension and 301 redirects

                Hi Recently I ask for some work done on my website from a company,  but I am not sure what they've done is right.
                What I wanted was html file extensions to be removed like
                /ash-logs.html to /ash-logs
                also the index.html to www.timports.co.uk
                I have done a crawl diagnostics and have duplicate page content and 32 page title duplicates. This is so doing my head in please help This is what is in the .htaccess file <ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed on
                ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache,combine_css, collapse_whitespace,move_css_to_head, remove_comments</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Connection keep-alive</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.html RewriteEngine On 
                 # Rewrite valid requests on .html files  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html?rw=1 [L,QSA] 
                 # Return 404 on direct requests against .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$  
                RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !rw=1 [NC]
                 RewriteRule ^ - [R=404] AddCharset UTF-8 .html # <filesmatch “.(js|css|html|htm|php|xml|swf|flv|ashx)$”="">#SetOutputFilter DEFLATE #</filesmatch> <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
                ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 years"
                ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 years"
                ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 years"</ifmodule> <files 403.shtml="">order allow,deny allow from all</files> redirect 301 /PRODUCTS http://www.timports.co.uk/kiln-dried-logs
                redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood.html
                redirect 301 /about_us.html http://www.timports.co.uk/about-us.html
                redirect 301 /log_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/log-delivery.html redirect 301 /oak_boards_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/oak-boards-delivery.html
                redirect 301 /un_edged_oak_boards.html http://www.timports.co.uk/un-edged-oak-boards.html
                redirect 301 /wholesale_logs.html http://www.timports.co.uk/wholesale-logs.html redirect 301 /privacy_policy.html http://www.timports.co.uk/privacy-policy.html redirect 301 /payment_failed.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-failed.html redirect 301 /payment_info.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-info.html

                Technical SEO | | ulefos
                1
              • webtarget

                What happens when a link goes to a dead url on my site?

                I noticed in Open Site Explorer, I have several incoming links going to dead urls because i re-organized my site. For example, there might be an incoming link to: sample.php?ID=8 The problem is that I moved the file to /subdir1 so it would be nice if it could link to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 BUT, on top of that, I have also changed the url to seo-friendly urls. So, really, it should link to /Category_Descripton/ProductName/8 and then get re-written to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 So, what are the implications of having these incoming links to dead urls other than the bad user experience. What are the implications from an SEO standpoint? What's the best way to fix this? Thanks.

                Technical SEO | | webtarget
                0
              • MarcLevy

                Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.

                Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop!  (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!

                Technical SEO | | MarcLevy
                0
              • BlinkWeb

                Should I move x-cart installation or 301 redirect?

                We have an existing e-commerce site built on x-cart. The default store location is www.site.com/store. The domain root however is just a static HTML page (currently using mainly graphics) and a nav menu. What would be a better option: 1. Move the install location to the root directory and get rid of the static HTML page. We would have to manually 301 redirect all the old pages to the new location. Not sure if there are negative implications with that. 2. Just optimize the HTML landing page? Seems like it is better to have products and categories as close to the root domain as possible... 3. 301 redirect the domain to www.site.com/store/ and optimize the homepage within the store. This option means we dont have to worry about 2000 redirects or the hassle of moving the store. Anyone had any experience with this and suggestions?

                Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb
                0
              Moz logo
              • Contact
              • Community
              • Free Trial
              • Terms & Privacy
              • Jobs
              • Help
              • News & Press
              • Mozcon
              © 2021 - 2023 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.