Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?

    Technical SEO
    4
    8
    2457
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Evo
      Evo last edited by

      Hi Guys

      After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones.  We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR.

      We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected.

      To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following:

      1. In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”.  This happens at server side.
      2. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect.
      3. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page.

      In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!?

      Thanks in advance.

      Dave - www.paysubsonline.com

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Evo
        Evo @ChrisDyson last edited by

        Chris - thanks for the heads up.  It's been a month since we made the changes and we haven't started to crawl back up the rankings yet. I'll see how it goes and report back.

        Cheers

        Dave

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Evo
          Evo @evolvingSEO last edited by

          Dan - thanks for the info.  Looks like we have some tidying up and a few tasks to do!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Evo
            Evo @NeilAnthony last edited by

            I was talking about Google but looking at the reports, we have suffered with Bing and Yahoo too.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • evolvingSEO
              evolvingSEO last edited by

              I would have set up 301s in .htaccess.

              However, I think you may just be citing a correlation not causation.  You have some WAY bigger issues:

              1. The homepage can be arrived at by:

              • paysubsonline.com
              • www.paysubsonline.com
              • paysubsonline.com/index.aspx <--returns a 404
              • www.paysubsonline.com/index.php <-- loads a "coming soon" page, completely different than homepage, though which you can get to - https://paysubsonline.com/howitworks.php and others etc...
              • www.paysubsonline.com/index.html <---returns a 404

              Redirect all possible variations on the homepage to one singular version and fix that old site that's showing up.

              2. Your sitemap has all URLs that look outdated (.htm extension and have "www" while the internal links in your site do not have "www") <--update your XML sitemap and resubmit to webmaster tools

              3. You have not robots.txt file.

              4. You have no canonical tag - which would be the last possible line of defense against all the duplicate content.

              I'd start with those things, hope that helps.

              -Dan

              Evo 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • NeilAnthony
                NeilAnthony @ChrisDyson last edited by

                Yes, that is a very good point.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • ChrisDyson
                  ChrisDyson last edited by

                  Dave,

                  Assuming your 301 redirects are technically correct then it will take time for your new page URLs to be indexed by the major search engines.

                  Be aware that your rankings may not come back 100% as they were before the change.

                  A 301 redirect does not pass all the PR and linkjuice as many SEO's assume. You can read about it in this interview with Matt Cutts and in this illustrated summary from Rand on SEOMoz

                  From my personal experience what you are seeing is normal just keep doing the good work you are currently doing a quite Google search with info:yournewdomain will show if your new domain has been added to the index.

                  NeilAnthony Evo 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • NeilAnthony
                    NeilAnthony last edited by

                    May I know which search engine rankings fell off the radar?

                    If it is the rankings of the old URLs, then it might be because 301 redirection would pass your link juice from the old to the new pages. It might also be good to see your new page's rankings.

                    It might take a little time for the passing of link juice from old to new and thus is the reason for the change in rankings.

                    Evo 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • Damian_Ed 0

                      Unsolved Temporary redirect from 302 to 301 for PNG File?

                      302 temporary riderect 301 http status image issue

                      #302HTTP #temporaryredirect
                      Hi everyone, Recently I have faced a crawl issue with my media images on website. For example this page url https://intreface.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Horion-screen-side-2.png has 302 HTTP Status and the recommendation is to change it 301. I have read the article on temporary redirections here:
                      https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection?_ga=2.45324708.1293586627.1702571936-916254120.1702571936
                      but its not written here how to redirect in my HTML 1 image url not the landing page.
                      Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.02.40.png
                      I have messaged to MOZ Support but they recommended to go for the MOZ Community!
                      Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.06.02.png Could you assist me wit this issue please? I can reach HTTML of the necessary page and change what I need for permanent redirection but firstly I need to understand how to do that correctly.

                      Technical SEO | | Damian_Ed 0
                      0
                    • wcksmith1

                      Proper 301 redirect code for http to https

                      I see lots of suggestions on the web for forwarding http to https.  I've got several existing sites that want to take advantage of the SSL boost for SEO (however slight) and I don't want to lose SEO placements in the process.  I can force all pages to be viewed through the SSL - that's no problem.  But for SEO reasons, do I need to do a 301 redirect line of code for every page in the site to the new "https" version?  Or is there a way to catch all with one line of code that Google, etc. will recognize & honor?

                      Technical SEO | | wcksmith1
                      0
                    • aactive

                      Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder

                      Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
                      subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
                      RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
                      RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks

                      Technical SEO | | aactive
                      0
                    • Dan-Lawrence

                      Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?

                      If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?

                      Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
                      0
                    • kellymandingo

                      301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site

                      Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
                      Canonical tag implemented
                      all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
                      Sitemap Updated
                      Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
                      no Robots text Blocking directory's 
                      Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do  so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul

                      Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
                      0
                    • NaescentAdam

                      Index.php and 301 redirect with Joomla

                      Hi, I'm running Joomla 1.7 with SEF on and I'm trying to do a htaccess redirect which fails. I have approximately 100 in effect so far and all working fine, but I have one snag. Index.php is not working as I need it to when it's redirected to www.myurl.com/ If I turn on index.php redirect to root using this code #index.php to root
                      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myurl.com$ [OR]
                      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.myurl.com$
                      RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.myurl.com/" [R=301,L] And then go to www.myurl.com/test.html I'm redirected to the homepage. I think this is because all pages are index.php in joomla. SEOMOZ and Google both think that index.php and root are duplicate pages. Does anyone have any advice for overcoming this? Thanks, Adam

                      Technical SEO | | NaescentAdam
                      0
                    • Squall315

                      Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

                      Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?

                      Technical SEO | | Squall315
                      0
                    • pbrothers24

                      How many jumps between 301 redirects is acceptable?

                      For example, I have a page A that should be redirected to page D, but instead A redirects to B, B redirects to C and C redirects to D. It's something I came across and wondering if its worth the dev time to change it. Thanks!

                      Technical SEO | | pbrothers24
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.