Should you ever reverse a 301
-
Hi
Im Looking at reversing a 301 i did 5 months ago, I originally changed names of a site for reasons where the site was going to be split into 2 where part of the site i would run and the other where i would get my business partner to run it
However since the 301 i have lost 80% of traffic and cannot find the reason as to what especially as everything looks perfect except the rankings, to put it into context 150 keywords i was tracking all were page 5 and below with 40% being page 1
Now only 7 from that same 150 are in the top 10 pages (First 100 results), The issue i have must be very rare as i have posted for help with little or no response, which tells me that the kind people who have looked could not see any issues as this is normally a very helpful community (below is the last thread i asked for help)
http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-how-to-get-those-juices-flowing
So 5 months on i am considering removing the 301 and hoping that some kind of normality returns by reinstating the old URL
So my question is that is what im about to do wise, do i have any options, is this something you have done in the past if so how did you get on
Thanks in advance
-
Please keep us updated
-
I am really tempted to revert back, but i have had some extremely busy bot activity since i turned on those internal URLs for a few days as posted by
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well
Although this image says humans they seem to be bots, the blue is current and the red line is last month so something is going on but not sure yet
Ill await another week then make a decision
Many thanks for taking the time to respond,
-
Yeah and I guess if it was a penalty you would have received an email - Google is being all transparent now. This is an odd situation you have. maybe you should kill the 301 just to see if the old site shoots back up. Weird, my friend... very weird. I wish I could be of any assistance but I have never seen this before. Good luck.
-
@ Billy
Thank you for responding
The link profile is not good in fact i have not linked to this new site that much as i wanted to see where i was before i embarked on a strategic plan of action, because i did not get much time i employed a third party to start a facebook and social media for me opposed to the linking however they thought they were doing me a favour by added random links.
I have many more than what you can see but most i have removed, i reported those to Google and showed them what i have done and they confirmed there was no manual penalty holding me back (no manual actions)
but i thought the 301 should push most of the link juice over from the old and that has not happened
I may just have to face facts that the 301 is not going to pass the juice over
but what my real question is why and where is the PR from the home page, there has to be an issue because the PR has gone to many inner pages but not the home
I thought like you did that im caught up in an algorithmic penalty but that wont pull PR from the home page and let inner pages have their page rank
-
Is it possible that the 301s actually don't have much to do with it? Or perhaps that doing this drew algorithmic attention to the website? In going over your website I, like others before me, couldn't find any reason for you to get knocked back so then I ran your site (the new one) through open site explorer and it seems the majority of your links are blog comments and most of those are on blogs that are in genres unrelated to what you do. It could just be that Google isn't giving you the credit for these links that they used to. Just a thought.
-
Thanks
Done pretty much everything i can think of.
the content is identical to the old site as i just changed names everything else including site structure is identical, the old site is totally removed from the Index (which only finished around 3 weeks ago (17k page site)
Had many of links changed over .. PR has updated many of the inner pages but the home page is still a PR1, down From a 4 and if you copy text from any of the pages it wont show in Google search
This to me says i have an issue, but what that issue is i do not know, i had a problem a few years back where i missed the Http:// from an internal link and somehow Google had interpreted that as a 301, i fixed that and PR and rankings returned within 48 hours. this seems awfully similar and checking for this throws up nothing.
Also open site explorer still has the old site at a PA of 60 my new url at 42 with hardly any of the links moving over, so its just not Google slow or cannot read the 301 correctly
Header responses are what they should be so little lost on this one
Ill give it to the next Link update which is the 11th and if not much else changed then ill remove the 301, but i was hoping there was something stopping me from ranking opposed to just bad luck
-
Have you done any similar link building to the new url?
Is the new url 100% clean? Is the content and intent the same or very similar?I've had similar experience where the 301 seemed to drop rank and make things worse, especially when the content doesn't match exactly. I've removed/reversed with good results, and I've also let a few incubate longer (with more link building) with good results.
If you've made an effort to build similar links, and even get some of the old links changed to point the new url and the ranking still doesn't come back - i'd remove the 301 and see what happens.
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
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Handling Multiple Domain 301 Redirects on Single htaccess file
Hello, I have a client that currently that has 9 different markets with different sub-domains on one server (aka one htaccess file.). All the sites have very similar Navigation and some of them contain the same products aka same URLs. The site is using Magento CMS and I'm trying to figure out how to redirect some products that have been removed from one of the stores. The problem I'm running into is when I try to redirect one store url, it redirects all the site's URLs. Example http://store.domain1.com/ http://store.domain2.com/ I'd like to redirect http://store.domain1.com/old-url.html to http://store.domain1.com/new-url.html without making http://store.domain2.com/old-url.html redirect. I've literally been pulling out my hair trying to figure this one out but have had no luck. Does anybody have any ideas on how I could do this without having the sites redirect or create any loops? Any wisdom from you apache experts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Erik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Erik-M0 -
301 old site to new site?
I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings). Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain? If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
301's, Mixed-Case URLs, and Site Migration Disaster
Hello Moz Community, After placing trust in a developer to build & migrate our site, the site launched 9 weeks ago and has been one disaster after another. Sadly, after 16 months of development, we are building again, this time we are leveled-up and doing it in-house with our people. I have 1 topic I need advice on, and that is 301s. Here's the deal. The newbie developer used a mixed-case version for our URL structure. So what should have been /example-url became /Example-Url on all URLs. Awesome right? It was a duplicate content nightmare upon launch (among other things). We are re-building now. My question is this, do we bite the bullet for all URLs and 301 them to a proper lower-case URL structure? We've already lost a lot of link equity from 301ing the site the first time around. We were a PR 4 for the last 5 years on our homepage, now we are a PR 3. That is a substantial loss. For our primary keywords, we were on the first page for the big ones, for the last decade. Now, we are just barely cleaving to the second page, and many are 3rd page. I am afraid if we 301 all the URLs again, a 15% reduction in link equity per page is really going to hurt us, again. However, keeping the mixed-case URL structure is also a whammy. Building a brand new site, again, it seems like we should do it correctly and right all the previous wrongs. But on the other hand, another PR demotion and we'll be in line at the soup kitchen. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yogitrout10 -
301 from one site to another
I have two e-commerce websites and i'm going to remove some products from website as requested by a supplier and sell them only on one site. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2?? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Very Puzzled --- 301 ReDirects Did Not Work - Lost Rankings - Any Thoughts?
This one has us stumped and frustrated, hopefully someone out there in SEOMoz land can give us some thoughts and/or suggestions on what's going on and how to remedy. This is a follow-up to a post I made awhile back. Here is an excerpt from the original post -- We currently have 3 different versions of our State Business-for-Sale listings pages - the versions are: Version 1 -- Preferred Version (Links on Homepage www.businessbroker.net) http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Vermont-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Title = Vermont Business for Sale Ads - Vermont Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker (I realize the title needs work) Version 2: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/blistings.ihtml) URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-Vermont.aspx Title = Vermont Business for Sale | 120 Vermont Businesses for Sale | BusinessBroker.net Version 3: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/businessesforsale.ihtml) URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_vermont.ihtml Title = Vermont Businesses for Sale at BusinessBroker.net - Vermont Business for Sale While the page titles and meta data are a bit different, the bulk of the page content (which is the listings rendered) are identical. OK, so we decided to test this on 5 of our State pages - I will use VERMONT in this discussion. We did 301 ReDirects on Version 2 and Version 3 -- they now redirect to Version 1 - we did the redirects and also changed the URL's on the pages. Prior to the change, we were ranking for keywords like "Vermont Business for Sale" and some other similar keywords -- on 1st page of Google --- now, we have lost our rankings big time. Did we do something wrong? I thought when you did 301's the majority of link juice was supposed to be preserved (losing 10% or so) -- this didn't happen in our case. Any help on what we can do would be appreciated. We only did 5 States as a test and also noticed big drops for Maine as well. These were both states where VERSION 2 was the page that was showing up in SERPs. Thanks in advance for wading through this long post and any help you can provide!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720 -
Why isnt my crawl results showing a 301 redirect even though I have a 301 rewrite in my .htaccess file?
Ive searched the previous Q&A's & cant find an answer so I;ll ask it here 🙂 crawling my site shows isnt the 301 redirect that i have from my non www to my www domainIts only showing all the results for my www subdomain.As i'm new to SEO & SeoMoz I dont fully understand. Any help would be greatly appreciated because my site is like 2 & a half years old & i'm trying to learn seo so I can rank higher in the serp's. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCTechGuy20120