Google’s John Mueller said on Friday in a webmaster video that redirecting all of your URLs to your home page is bad practice. Instead, you should redirect those URLs on a one by one basis to the proper new location.

This is common sense to most SEOs but I’ve seen many sites do a redesign and new CMS and just redirect all the old URLs to the home page and not try to redirect those URLs to the new URL with the same content on the old URL.

John said this at the 1 hour 6 minute and 10 second mark; “redirecting everything to just the homepage is a really bad practice.” ” Because we lose all of the signals that are associated with the the old content if you’re just saying well the homepage replaces all of these lower level pages” he added.

You will confuse Google and Google might say it doesn’t make sense to redirect all those signals to your home page. John said this is a “really bad kind of technique.”

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at YouTube.