301 Redirect Head Scratcher

[Batfink1974]

I'm considering 301 redirecting an inner page url, which I believe has been over-optimised with toxic links - The offending url : example/product

My plan is to 301 redirect the above to an inner page not essential for organic search.

My question is - Do I need to 301 redirect all the subsequent url's from the offending url ?

For example :-

example/product/beans
example/product/dog-food
example/product/bmx-bike
example/product/space-hoppers

Many thanks!

 

[makeusvisible]

If you perform a 301 redirect from the page which has toxic links, to the new page, you will essentially be redirecting those toxic links to the new page.

One way or another you really need to deal with the inbound links which you believe to be toxic.

i.e contact the website owners and ask them to remove the links. If that doesn't work think about disavowing the links via Google Search Console.

 

[Batfink1974]

Thanks for your reply ... however, since Penguin hammered us in 2012, we've done 5 link removal projects / Disavows, all to no avail.

All our other keywords have recovered and have come to the conclusion Google hate this particular URL because we massively pushed our luck.

My plan was to 301 re-direct the offending page to a URL we don't use for SEO purposes and just start again with a clean URL .... end of the day, the new URL can't do much worse than page 12.

 

[webgeek]

Remove the toxic page, clean build a new page, drop in the content and DO NOT redirect it, if in fact you have toxic backlinks pointed to it. Let the old one 404, then do a removal request in WMT/GSC (whatever it's called this week).

Are you certain the page isn't suffering page quality issues, like dupe content/title/meta description or competing against another page on your site?

 

[SEO Lady]

Remove the toxic page, clean build a new page, drop in the content and DO NOT redirect it, if in fact you have toxic backlinks pointed to it. Let the old one 404, then do a removal request in WMT/GSC (whatever it's called this week)

I came here to second this. If you have toxic backlinks pointing to a URL by redirecting it, you're passing on the backlink to the new URL, so delete the page and as Webgeek said read up on URL removal in GSC

This is how I do it using a Chrome extension

1. Open Chrome
2. Visit Github to download the Bulk URL Removal Chrome extension
3. Visit Webmaster Tools > Google Index > Remove URLs
4. “Remove URLs” page
5. Select your choice from the dropdown
6. Upload your list of URLs

Read the full process here:
https://www.searchcommander.com/how-to-bulk-remove-urls-google/