sending multiple 301s to the same page

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sending multiple 301s to the same page

is there harm in using multiple redirects if a page is still relevant

catherineSEO 7

10:47 am on Aug 17, 2015 (gmt 0)

I'm looking at website which which is undergoing a redesign: a load of pages are being completely removed. The question that I have is whether is bad practise to send lots of 301s to the same page?

e.g. the site formerly had multiple pages with examples of their work/case studies is not being amalgamated into a single page 'clients we've helped':

I'd say that this page is still relevant for the old URLs but am worried that sending a couple hundred of 301 redirects to 1 page might be a bit dodgy.. .

lucy24

8:22 pm on Aug 17, 2015 (gmt 0)

a couple hundred

Yikes. I could see where page consolidation might result in three or four URLs collapsing to just one-- but how can a single URL be relevant to several hundred different requests? Are you sure you don't want a nice custom 410 page instead? You can make different ones for each directory.

There's also an in-between solution. Since a redirect is a message sent back to the browser, you can send your visitors to a specific point on the new page. like

:: shuffling papers ::

RewriteRule ^dir/subdir/(kabloona|yesno)\.html http://example.com/newdir/newpage.html#$1 [R=301,L,NE]

Or SSI equivalent, of course. Here your human visitor gets the exact content they were expecting; it just happens to form part of an entirely different page.