How many 301 Redirects are OK?

I have been preaching since years that too many 301 redirects are not good for your sites seo. I have myself experienced this when once I removed 400+ urls in my site and redirected them to other new websites the ranking and traffic of my website dropped. I have been very very conscious about it since then.

But I have a new situation this time. I have yet another website that has over 10000+ urls. The website is coded in Cakephp. I need to rebuild it in Wordpress. This will eventually result in change in the url structure and over 10000+ urls will be needed to 301'd to new urls.

This is inevitable and I must do it. I know it can leave a bad impact as per my past experience.

So I want to ask this question to my experienced friends on BHW, have you also faced such situation in the past? What is your opinion about number of 301 any site should have? Will it really give too adverse impact on my sites SEO?
How many 301's do you think are OK?

Please share your views, I am very serious about this question. Thank you!

Redirects in the past have been a mix of both. I remember switching to Shopify before which has a completely different URL structure. This caused all my rankings to drop as all of the new pages needed to reindex. If you keep all titles and descriptions the same however it might stay the same. Personally, I changed a few things with the new pages which luckily ended better in the long run.

i am currently using 10 Redirects 301. and its good.

Jabbz18 said:

Redirects in the past have been a mix of both. I remember switching to Shopify before which has a completely different URL structure. This caused all my rankings to drop as all of the new pages needed to reindex. If you keep all titles and descriptions the same however it might stay the same. Personally, I changed a few things with the new pages which luckily ended better in the long run.

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It means that you also experienced the drop in traffic in your case. In my case the site in question has over 10k urls and the traffic is also around 20k pageviews per month. It earns good ad revenue. So if the traffic drops it will result in loss for sure at least for few months.

Anonymous jaat said:

i am currently using 10 Redirects 301. and its good.

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This is a very small number my friend. My problem is even bigger - 10k redirects.

Hi Sageshark,

any migration can lead to organic traffic drop, even a simple http to https. But for what I know their is no such a limit with redirects number, and as you said this is inevitable, so you must do it.

For me the main question is : Are you going to make this website better than what it is ? Do you beleve that the new URL structure is going to be better from a user perspective ?

If instead you feel that the actual structure is better than the one you are going to create migrating to WP I can understand that you are a bit worry.

That being said if the actual structure is the best from your point of view, remember that with custom developpement you can do quiet everything you want with wordpress, even when it's about the touchy area of URL structure and permalinks.

Think also about performance

Another good practice, as we are talking about many redirects, and maybe complex rules is to serve the redirect as soon as possible and RewriteMap could be much better and much faster that classical htaccess redirects

Good luck

cloakit said:

For me the main question is : Are you going to make this website better than what it is ? Do you beleve that the new URL structure is going to be better from a user perspective ?

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Thanks for the detailed reply .

Yes, I am going to make the new url structure better than the previous one. I think I should be better prepared for this drop and loss and then continue doing good work on it so that the site would be much better than it is now.

sageshark said:

This is a very small number my friend. My problem is even bigger - 10k redirects.

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I am running well over 1K+ on one of my sites that was built on an expired domain. Let's say that the old URL structure was quite crap.

Still, everything is fine and Google recognizes the link.

Also, make sure that you keep the old URLs in the sitemap as well for at least a year. This will help Google to crawl those links fairly fast and recognize the redirects (It's considered best practice by Google and it really helps.)

Nargil said:

Also, make sure that you keep the old URLs in the sitemap as well for at least a year. This will help Google to crawl those links fairly fast and recognize the redirects (It's considered best practice by Google and it really helps.)

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This sound like a best suggestion. Thank you mate, I will remember this.