Is my 301 redirect working?
-
Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function.
However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date.
Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?
-
Thanks Mike..great instructions to 301 via .htaccess file.
-
hi mike,
thanks for the detailed response. that seems like a pretty solid methodology. apparently resubmitting your old sitemap also helps google to recrawl those old url's..
although this is a bit off the point from the original question in this thread, this is a great Q&A answer from one of the seomoz staff about how to implement sitewide redirects http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/45183/update-url-structure
-
Hi Hugh,
Glad the advice helped
I have run into issues with Wordpress plugins in the past (ones that do various things!) and for important stuff like 301's, I tend to prefer working in .htaccess manually, as I can see what it is happening, and see how to fix any issues easier.
If you run into the issue whereby you are doing massive amounts of 301's, it is sometimes possible to do re-write rules on the URL structure to effect large amounts of 301's, however this can be a bit more involved
Anyway, glad you got it sorted - did you check them with the http header check tool? (there are a few like that tool I linked to in case you prefer others, simply google: http header status tool
And that should give you a few (just letting you know in case you either prefer others, or if that one goes down when you need it ever).
Cheers!
Mike.
-
All done. I added the redirects to the .htaccess directly, and it's now working as it should.
Bonza.
In answer to your question - about 15 pages, so not un-doable by hand.
-
In theory, I agree with you. However, the plugin didn't work, and editing the .htaccess did, so I'm going with that in future!
-
I think that to work directly in the .htacces would not be needed, as that should be the purpose of the wordpress plugin...
-
Hi, I am not Gianluca, but hope you don't mind my input here!
From our own experience, this is what happens:
1) Implement a 301
-
TEST to ensure you get the correct header status (301 permanently moved)
-
Google eventually crawls the old page, and finds the 301 redirect
-
After some time, Google replaces the old URL with the new URL.
Now, as for speeding things up, in my opinion (born out by testing), counter to your idea of adding the new URL to webmaster tools, it is better to get Google to find the actual 301 redirect, before the new url
(this way, Google won't see the new URL as a duplicate, before it finds the old, now 301 redirected, URL, which in theory 'could' happen if both pages had the same content/title tag, etc - Although with just 1 or 2 redirects, it is quite unlikely, and should resolve itself pretty quick).
So what I like to do, is try to get Googlebot to the old (301'd) page as soon as possible once it has been implemented (and tested!).
To do this, consider pinging the URL, or pinging your RSS feed (if your site has them) - Tweet about the fact you did a redirect, and link from twitter to the old URL, or even, if you have done some website redesign, write a press release about it, and within the PR, link to the old page... Basically, anything to get google old Googlebot to crawl the old URL< and find the 301 redirect
Others may disagree, but this does appear to work well for us!
Hope that helps,
Mike.
-
-
I like to add the 301's myself in the .htaccess file, with the following format:
Redirect 301 /url-goes-here.html http://www.yoursite.com/url-goes-here.html
Be sure to use that structure (eg. NO http://www. on the old page, but have it on the new page)
Maybe try that for 1 URL, and see if it works for you? - I have to say, be sure to not delete any o fthe other stuff in your .htaccess file! - Best to create a backup BEFORE editing
Remember, when doing web design, coding, or on-page SEO, if anything goes wrong, the worse thing that should happen is that you have to revert back to the bacup that you made before you started
Although if you have lots to do, then you can automate it... various ways to do that!
Really it depends on the context of what you want to do.
Can I ask, how many pages do you want to 301 redirect?
-
Hi Gianluca,
Sorry for butting into this thread, hope you dont mind:
So the process that typically happens is:
1. 301 redirect is implemented but older pages remain in the index and ranking
2. Over time Google will drop the older pages and replace them in their index with the new pages
Is that the process? Is it an exact replacement, and is there a period of overlap when both the new and old pages are ranking?
Also, is it possible to speed up the process by delisting the old URL with GWT and adding the new URL to GWT?
Thanks in advance
-
Wordpress Simple 301 Redirect plugin did NOT give me 301s on the site you recommended. So, for anyone else reading this subsequently - don't use that
However, I then went and just inserted redirects into the .htaccess, and that worked like a charm. Win.
Thanks very much!
-
It was a few weeks ago, and we're crawled pretty frequently. I think my theme is Not Doing What It Should.
-
HTTP/1.1 200 OK. Oh, dammit.
I'm going to try installing a plugin to sort this problem out, and if that doesn't work, I'll be back. Thanks!
-
It can take a while for Google to update - how long ago did you do this?
I would look here: http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php
Enter an old URL, and hit 'Submit' - You should then be taken to a results page, and hopefully will see this:
"HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => "
If you don't, something is wrong
Try that tool, and copy/paste the result here for everyone to take a peek at - we will then help if we can, as we will have more to go on
Hope that helps!
Oh, and also, consider this plugin for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/
-
First question: how long ago did you do the redirect 301?
This is not a stupid question. In fact Google will show the change of urls in the serps (and therefore the new snippet) just after a certain time.
That does not mean that it is not indexing your new pages (try a search with their URL to check this), simply the old ones are still present in the index.
Irritating, yes...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is there a way to set up 301 auto redirects from 404s
some of our pages under a specific website section gets deleted from another data source and we want to resolve the problem of 404s can we set up automated 301 redirects to the main page as soon as one of these pages are deleted
Technical SEO | | lina_digital2 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
301 Redirect for 3 Domains into 1 New Domain
So I wanted a quick sanity check on the htaccess syntax for migrating 3 domains into 1 new domain. For example, we're migrating 3 sites abc.com, def.com and ghi.com, all into 1 new site on ghi.com. Here's the htaccess we're placing on the root of ghi.com: redirect 301 http://www.abc.com/wines.html http://www.ghi.com/wines redirect 301 http://www.def.com/trade.html http://www.ghi.com/trade
Technical SEO | | cmaseattle
redirect 301 http://www.ghi.com/winery-tours.html http://www.ghi.com/visit/taste On the DNS side of things, we're parking abc.com and def.com on the ghi.com server. I'm not seeing examples of htaccess files for this scenario, and none that use any domain info on the "from" side of the redirect 301 syntax. Any suggestions before we pull the trigger? Thanks!0 -
301 Redirect Questions
I have a site I built on a wisiwig editing platform that will not allow a 301 redirect. The site has already been remade and I need to point it to another domain. To do the redirect, can I change it to another domain host that will allow a 301 or will that make me loose the authority of the site? I may not be able to move the content of the site. Please help.
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
When is it safe to remove 301 redirects?
I have created over 500 301 redirects in my .htaccess file, some of them are more than 2 years old now. Should I delete them? I don't like seeing the "notices" number in crawl diagnostics so high 😞
Technical SEO | | danielshaw0 -
Rel=cannonical + 301 redirect
Hi All I am currently working on a DotNetNuke site. I have enabled friendly URL's which have changed the url structure from the default setting of TabId=x to whatever the page name is set as. I will use the following page as an example - www.notarealdomain./graphicdesign.aspx Now I would like to know if it would be worth my time to change this to "/graphic-design.aspx through the use of a 301 redirect and/or a rel=can. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | masterpete0 -
301 Redirects
Last year we merged 3 websites into 1 website and launched the new site in February. When developing the new site I created 301 redirects for all the pages from the old sites to the new site. Unfortunately when the new website was created the URLs were not optimised for search engines. I now need to optimised the page URLs. In theory I need to create new 301 redirects from this existing pages to the new optimised URLS. I am concerned that in a few years I might end up with a string of 301 redirects and if I break some links I might loose some ranking. How many redirects will link juice work for? I hope I'm clear here, if not I've attached a image showing what I'm doing. Thank you. unledfh.jpg
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0 -
How should 301 redirects affect Page Authority?
We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages. We want to quantify what we expect to see as results. From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously. For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57. It our thinking correct? How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this? Thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0