What's your experience of using 301 redirects? Good, bad or ugly?

[foxtucker]

My main site has been has been live since 2004, it's a 'mobile casino' portal and it gets acceptable organic traffic.

Over the years, the site and it's structure has grown due to three factors:

1. Significant increase in compatible mobile devices.
2. Many more mobile games.
3. Many more brands/operators.

A result of these factors over 8 years, the folder structure of the site isn't all intuitive, the folder names aren't all seo optimised, and I find updating the site is taking longer and longer.

None of this is a problem for the users, as I have the navigation working well enough that the user doesn't need to concern themselves with the folder structure or folder names.

So "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" I hear you yelling. I am inclined to agree, but wonder if I'm missing out on some good organic traffic due to poorly crafted folder names created 5 years ago, and I personally would certainly benefit from spending less time maintain the site.

I've read that 301 redirects could be the solution that allows me to tidy up the folder structure/names.

Does anyone have experience on the effectiveness or horror stories of 301 redirects?

[universal4]

I lean toward the "if it aint broke don't fix it" but you can still take advantage of a more optimized folder structure of any new content you put up.

Sure 301's pretty much do there job, but I am always a bit aprehensive using them to move large amounts of pages when they pages are fine where they are.

Broken pages and broken links, by all means use them.

Don't forget if you change the folder structure of where a page resides, if there are links pointing to that page they will no longer exist since the incoming link will now be a 404. A visitor following that link will be fine since they will be redirected, but you still lose a lot of the incoming link seo benfit.

Rick
Universal4

[lots0]

I also lean toward "if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

I believe that Google has lowered the importance of keyword rich URL's, over the last year, so IMO reorganizing just for the SEO benefit, would be a risk and a lot of work for little benefit.

In my experience 301's work fine, with google, but don't work so good with Bing.

You can also get carried away with 301's, if you depend on them too much... I saw a site a few months ago that had at least 1500 individual 301's for specific pages... What a freaking mess to update or trouble shoot.

If you can use htaccess(Apache Server), rewriting the URL's and generating the 301's at the same time... is also an option.

[universal4]

To clarify, Apache is not necessary for using htaccess.

The same can be accomplished on IIS using Helicon or the reqrite modules on Server 008.

Rick
Universal4