301 redirects tanked our site on google - what now?
-
We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics.
So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword.
Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages.
What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it?
Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise.
Jean
-
Thanks so much for your response - and for reminding me to be patient.
I've tried leaving the pages intact with a link to the new url and found that the five or six pages of old vintages all pointing to the new page resulted in hundreds of almost empty pages.
I thought that it was effecting my SEO, having so many pages with almost nothing on them.
I have to put the info about all the older vintages on the current product so the customer can get the full story. So I can't put the info about each past vintage on its one page and then put all of the content on the current page.
Google counts that as duplicate content.
I'm not sure what you mean by "archive them"?
Thanks again,
Jean
-
Thanks so much for your words of wisdom.
Re the url with 2008 in the title - the "2008" is an unfortunate consequence of the way we named the pages originally. It is the most relevant page and lists the 2010 wine. This is not a page that was incorrectly redirected, the url's name was poorly designed.
Should I rename the pages to leave off the vintage? Ideally I'd think the url would be something like "shea-wine-cellar-homer-pinot-noir.html and not have the vintage in it at all. But, renaming all of those differently dated pages would require 301's, wouldn't it? That's a lot of 301s - a lot of the pages have the wrong vintage in the url.
Re why google is liking the blog post link that seems less on target versus the wine's own page - this has been happening since 1)I started posting good fresh content on the blog everyday; and 2) especially since the redirects - it's been more in the last few days than ever before.
I'll check, but the 301's were put i place by a very very good IT guy.
Again, thank you so much.
Jean
-
Yes, that is the information desired, thank you.
I do notice the 2009 review is more then double the length of the 2010 review, which is thin by comparison. Otherwise the page seems fine.
I tried navigating to other pages such as Oregon > Oregon Pinot Noir > Highest Rated Pinots and selected the first link "Shea Wine Cellars Homer Pinot noir 2010" but notice the URL is http://www.northwest-wine.com/Shea-Wine-Cellars-Homer-Pinot-noir-2008.html.
The link still shows 2008. Not a big deal per se, but it leads to questions about the redirects. Are you sure they were performed properly?
More importantly, it seems there is at least some keyword cannibalization on your site. I tried searching Google.com for "Shea Wine Cellars Homer Pinot noir 2010" which is an exact title match to the above page. Your site ranks 11th for the term but a different page appears: http://www.northwest-wine.com/wine/2012/05/the-shea-vineyard-2010-homer-estate-block-31-block-7/
Further analysis is required to determine the root cause of the issue. I would suggest first checking the 301s to ensure they were performed properly. I would also check your site for similar keywords to the redirected pages. When I search your site using your search box for "Shea Wine Cellars Homer Pinot noir 2010" the only page that comes up is the 2008.html page. Clearly Google.com feels the other page is more relevant.
-
Hold tight and give yourself at least a week before evaluating the result of your change.
I wouldn't redirect those myself. I'd just archive them, tack on a sold out notice, tweak the copy and offer a link to the new url.
-
http://www.northwest-wine.com is the site.
Here's an example of an old page that has not yet been redirected:
http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Willamette-Valley-Pinot-noir-2009.html
Here's the new page we'll redirect it to when it is sold out:
http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Pinot-noir-WV-2010.html
You can see why we are redirecting - the older page has the same content as the newer one, except the newer one has the additional content for the new vintage. I'm consolidating all of the older vintage tasting notes onto one page with the newer ones.
Is this the info you need? Thanks SO much for the quick response.
Jean
-
In order to offer any tangible advice, we would need to examine your site along with an example of an old article along with the new page which replaced it.
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
-
.aspx 301 redirects on Business Catalyst
Hi I am have moved my website from .aspx to business catalyst. I have found out (when the site already migrated!) that Business Catalyst does not support .aspx 301 redirects. On a previous post from 2012 (https://moz.com/community/q/aspx-files-will-simply-not-work-as-redirects) , someone has recommended a java script re direct. I have tried this but google search console is classing this as a 404 resulting in no link juice and my website dropping pages on google. I have tried to do 301 redirects at my server level but wont work. Anyone know a solution? Thanks in advance Keith
Technical SEO | | EntertainmentIdeas0 -
Dev Site Was Indexed By Google
Two of our dev sites(subdomains) were indexed by Google. They have since been made private once we found the problem. Should we take another step to remove the subdomain through robots.txt or just let it ride out? From what I understand, to remove the subdomain from Google we would verify the subdomain on GWT, then give the subdomain it's own robots.txt and disallow everything. Any advice is welcome, I just wanted to discuss this before making a decision.
Technical SEO | | ntsupply0 -
Why isn't my site not searchable from google?
I am having a hard time figuring out why is it that when I search for my website name, it didn't show up in google's search result? Here's a link to my site. I've been twiddling for days looking for answers in my google webmaster tools. Here's a link of the crawl stats from google webmaster tool. As you can see it is actually crawling some pages. However my looking at my indexed status, I am getting 0 as you can see here (http://cl.ly/image/3G1R1p0b3k1P). I've double checked for my robots.txt and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there. I am not blocking anything. Any ideas why?
Technical SEO | | herlamba0 -
Do I need both canonical meta tags AND 301 redirects?
I implemented a 301 redirect set to the "www" version in the .htaccess (apache server) file and my logs are DOWN 30-40%! I have to be doing something wrong! AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com
Technical SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm
RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] IndexIgnore *
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.luckygemstones.com/internal-serv-error.htm
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.luckygemstones.com/forbidden-request.htm
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.luckygemstones.com/not-authorized.htm I've also started adding canoncial META's to EACH page: I'm using HMTL 4.0 loose still--1000's of pages--painful to convert to HTML5 so I left the / off the tag so it would validate. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks, Kathleen0 -
I think google thinks i have two sites when i only have one
Hi, i am a bit puzzled, i have just used http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=in2town.co.uk to check my anchor text and forgot to put in the www. and the information came up totally different from when i put the www. in it shows a few links for the in2town.co.uk but then when i put in www.in2town.co.uk it gives me different information, is this a problem and if so how do i solve this | | | | | | | | |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| | | | | | | | |0 -
Remove Site from Google
How can I get my website out of google? I want all pages completely gone. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Wordpress 301 redirects
I use wordpress as CMS on a few sites and I noticed that word press automattically places 301s if I change a url etc. I believe it does it by having the following in the .htaccess file: BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Should I use this? I feel like it limits my control over the 301s.
Technical SEO | | mmaes0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0