Changing Internal links after a 301 redirect

[aidanfitz]

Hello

We recently updated our website and changed the structure of the urls to include our key phrases. Thankfully the 301 redirect went perfectly and none of our phrases dropped in rank.
Currently for much of the internal linking, the old urls are visible in the html code, so basically you go through the redirect to get to the newer urls, if you get my drift. Also when you hover over the links the old url is visible in the bottom bar
My question is..is it better to not go through the redirect and insert the actual new destination urls in the html for the purposes of seo? Also the site is very large..is there a quick fix technically as opposed to a manual change?

Cheers

[crankydave]

As far as any external links to the old URL's AND (more importantly IMO) as far as any current SE rankings for the old URL's, if you don't put a 301 in place for them, the external links won't credited to the new URL's and any searchers will get a 404.

Dave

[aidanfitz]

Thanks for the reply

I suppose what i need to know is should we be inserting the new urls in the html code rather than the old ones, as the redirect has already gone through or alternatively is there a waiting period you have to go through? All of our pages are ranking for the new urls but in all of the code for the internal links the old urls are present so the bots are going through the redirect.

Cheers

[wige]

I would change the internal URLs to the new form as soon as possible. There is a theory that Google may stop displaying the new URLs in the SERPs and revert back to the old form, if the spider detects that the preferred link is to the old format. The example that I saw was for xbox.com. The actual web site is something like xbox.microsoft.com, but xbox.com is redirected to that url. When you do a search on Google, the xbox.com form shows up in the results because a) its cleaner. It is shorter, and in most cases closer to the entered search term, and the engine is set up with certain biases to cause some URLs to be used instead of others. b) It is preferred - most web links go to xbox.com, not the page that it redirects to. As a result, the search engines guesses that that is what should be displayed in the SERPs.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by aidanfitz

Thanks for the reply

I suppose what i need to know is should we be inserting the new urls in the html code rather than the old ones, as the redirect has already gone through or alternatively is there a waiting period you have to go through? All of our pages are ranking for the new urls but in all of the code for the internal links the old urls are present so the bots are going through the redirect.

Cheers

Yes if you are talking about your own internal site code. You should not be linking to any of the old links whenever possible. You basically dont want the old links crawled any longer.