: SEO penalty for landing page redirects Using ebay as an example- lets say I have a large number of items whose URLs' look like this: cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1981-VW-Vanagon-manual-seats-seven-/250953153841

@Shelley277

No, this will not hurt you.

On the surface, a redirected landing page may sound spammy, but Google knows that legitimate sites may change site structure, and the 301 redirect is specifically intended to retain link juice from an old URL. Legitimate sites use automatic redirects for many other legitimate activities as well, such as short-link landing pages and desktop/mobile site switching. You have probably seen sites where the home page redirects from example.com to example.com/landingpage, and Google does not seem to be bothered by those either.

I have also personally experienced positive impact and no negative impact from using such redirects. I had a site with a large number of product pages where we wanted to add text to the URL for increased SEO. We changed the URL structure a bit to achieve this and put in a redirect for all of the old links. The redirects are still in place, and we now have more of those pages indexed by Google than we ever did in the past.

PeeHaa mentions canonical URLs as another option. I recommend doing 301 redirects and specifying canonical URLs. This will help ensure that search engines index the correct URL and reduce potential duplicate content issues from your various links.

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@RJPawlick198

Redirecting would not be a problem as long as you do a 301 redirect.

Another option might be using canonical URL's.

But I think a redirect would be preferred here so that users will see the pretty url.

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