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I have a large number of pages having similar but not identical content. Example: site.com/dream_dictionary_flying and site.com/dream_interpretation_flying.

The problem is that although not being identical, they are sometimes on the edge of being duplicate content. The solution via redirect 301 in htaccess is simple and can be done in a minute, BUT, changing all existing links on the whole site from "/something" to "/something_else" would take ages, it would be thousands of manual changes taking x hundreds of hours.

My question is this; is it bad for SEO to have internal links that are redirected, or rather HOW bad is it? For the human user it would not matter at all but from what I have experienced, the search engines don't like it. Is there any rule of thumb here? Please come back with your thoughts and experience on this.

Thanks for answers! But as I mentioned above, my experience is that it CAN give penalty: when I - by mistake - have created a rule in htaccess that leads to one or more links in the navigation being redirected - the traffic from search engines drops sharply (approx -10-15%) within hours. When I say it is in the navigation, I mean it is then a redirect on every single page on the whole site.

If the observation above is correct, this could mean one of two things

  1. Yes, of course the whole site is penalized if you are that reckless and stupid!

  2. No, it is not the WHOLE site that is penalized - it is each INDIVIDUAL page having a redirect that is slightly penalized. Not so much that you would notice it with just having a redirect on only 0,01% of the pages but when it is on all pages it becomes noticeable.

Can this be correct, that each page having a link with an internal redirect would become ever so slightly penalized?

Bill the Lizard
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Jonas Lindqvist
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It's not bad and won't harm you. Technically a small amount of PageRank is not transferred with the redirect but the amount is small and inconsequential. You can do this without worry or repercussion.

Another solution is to use canonical URLs. It tells Google those pages are essentially the same and lets them know which one to consider the "main" page and to include in its search results.

John Conde
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  • agree. Duplicate content is not the evil it's generally thought to be. Use `` to help tell the search engines which of the different URLs for the same content is the one you want to show in the search results. – Rodolfo Jun 28 '12 at 14:34
  • Thanks for answers! I added comment in the original post above. Please come back with thoughts. – Jonas Lindqvist Jun 28 '12 at 15:56
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    Agree with this - and rel=canonical in this case is better than a 301 redirect. 301 says this content has moved to a new page, and incurs a small ~10% PR penality. rel=canonical says these two pages should be treated as the same page, and no pr is lost. – Rafael Baptista Jun 28 '12 at 17:36