301 redirects and Developer

I have a problem that I hope you may be able to help me with.

Our site is currently has 100's of old urls that have been indexed giving me two problems - duplicate content for some and for older ones 404 pages.
To date I have been getting our developer to do 301 redirects on these pages. But he is now saying that this is not efficient and that due to the quantity I am slowing the site down. Also its not recommended to have as many 301’s on the site as this can effect the performance of the site in general. Is this correct ?
He says that I should not focus on individual pages but only problems at the top level domain.e.g mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com. However these individual pages are important and have been indexed.What should i do?

Have you come across this problem - they developed the site with no seo in mind and this is the consequence of their development.

I would love to hear your advice and experience

 

I think 100 redirects wouldn't hurt anyone (my opinion)

 

IMO there would be no negative effect of 301 redirection on your website. It will help users and crawlers to find the real(new) pages that you want to index and also by doing 301 redirection, your new pages will acquire the weightage(PR juice) from the old pages..

 

I have 100's of redirects on some of the sites I work on - with no negative effect at all!

You shouldn't expect a developer to understand too much about SEO so don't let him dictate what may or may not be best. SEO done properly is very analytical and so individual pages, even down to the individual words on them, do matter.

Sometimes you have to be forceful. . .

 

Sorry don't know that deeply but yes too many redirects can harm the site in long run.
Also Google may consider it as duplication also.

 

If a redirect is done properly, then it will not be classed as duplicate content. Google themselves recommend a 301:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

 

Not, if done right. A 301 Redirect tells the search engine both that the page has “Moved Permanently” to a new location. As a result, all the PageRank and link reputation of the old page will be assigned to the new page.

 

use .htaccess 301 redirect for ur site. that will save ur redirecting time.

 

IMO 301 redirect will be very helpful option for your site at the present situation. With this redirect option you will not lose your traffic as well as back links and PR also. 301 is there to solve such problems in SEO.

 

Use custom default 404 page to rectify ur 404 problems of older pages.

 

IMO whether you 301 redirect the old URL to some new URL or simply return a 404 Not Found status should be based on two things:

1) Does the old URL have backlinks from other sites?
2) Do you have a new URL whose content resembles the content of the old page?

1)----2)----Disposition
N-----N-----404
N-----Y-----301 if you think it visitors have it bookmarked, otherwise 404
Y-----N-----301 to home page if you want to preserve PR of inbound links, otherwise 404
Y-----Y-----301

 

It would help if we knew why that is supposed to be a problem. My suspicion is that the developer meant a more or less mechanical problem with resources and response time owing to a ton of individual redirect directives in an .htaccess file. (Mind, I don't myself know if that would really create a slowdown, but it's possible that a) it would, and/or b) that's what was meant.)

If the pages in question have similarities in the paths such that many of them could be addressed at once by a regular expression, that would probably help.

As someone mentioned, a well-crafted custom 404 page is another good bet. It seems to me that surprisingly few webmasters do much about 404s. A good custom 404 page will try to redirect common erroneous URLs, and will log all calls that generate an initial 404, so that the webmaster can see what is being asked for that isn't there and try to fix the problem in some way, from a redirect generated in that custom file (using, say, PHP) to a nice explanatory message.

By the way, if you use a custom 404 page and it can't correctly redirect the call but has to send a notice to the visitor, make sure that it generates a header that uses 404. A common mistake is to send an ordinary page, a 200, as the "error message".