301 redirecting many pages in a directory/folder - have you done it?

I'm thinking of running a test to see the effects of 301 redirecting a bunch of pages

• from their existing directory: mydomain.com/stuff/[slug]
• to a new directory: mydomain.com/products/[slug]

I would utilize a 301 redirect, and make sure to change the rel canonical tag.

Firstly I'd love to know, has anyone done this on a somewhat large scale (1000s of pages)?

Second, what results did you achieve? I would certainly expect some level of bouncing around in the SERP, and that's ok. Did it shake out to have a net positive effect on your rankings? Neutral? Negative?

I will try it myself and report back, but I'm curious to hear any war stories. I've heard from others and read in the Google raters guidelines that different parts of sites can be judged independently, and I'm curious to see if the same content will rank differently given a new URL path.

Will result in increased spam score, first hand info.

GuerillaZ said:

Will result in increased spam score, first hand info.

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Thanks for the response, but can't tell if you're being facetious haha. Can you tell me more? I didn't cross my mind that it would result in an increased "spam score" - also what's that score? According to who? Google doesn't publish such a thing.

I would think it's not too uncommon for sites large or small to want to rethink their URL structure, within the same domain...

leiferikson said:

what's that score? According to who?

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he's probably referring to MOZ's spam score metric, and if he does, then that's a bogus metric. If it's something else, I don't know...

GuerillaZ said:

Will result in increased spam score, first hand info.

Click to expand...

leiferikson said:

Thanks for the response, but can't tell if you're being facetious haha. Can you tell me more? I didn't cross my mind that it would result in an increased "spam score" - also what's that score? According to who? Google doesn't publish such a thing.

Click to expand...

Moz spam score is just a shitty metric just like all the others

Anyway, I didn't try this myself, but I would say that you'll get the same result as redirecting a single page (a few SERPs dance then bounce back) since it's basically a redirect of a page to a new URL made for multiple ones (large scale)
if you decide to go on, would love to see results as well