Why did I drop ranking after setting up perm redirect, sitemap, and Google places??
-
I have a site that was ranking in the top two for my search terms. We had a funky url (it contained hyphens) and was advised to change it for SEO, so I setup a perm redirect through my web host (before it was a temporary one I think) At the same time I installed a sitemap plugin for Wordpress and also registered for a Google Places account. I can't remember the exact order I did this -- does it matter? Anyway, within a couple days of doing the above, my ranking dropped to the bottom of the second page. I would like to fix this, but I'm not sure. I need help please!
-
The site is three months old and I did the 301 about two weeks ago.
We can rule out the EMD problem since the old domain was just the name of the business. Plus everything was fine until two weeks ago when I messed it up, and that would be too coincidental.
Is there any issue with redirecting an html site to a php site?
-
I am not totally sure if it is a big difference. However, my Dr. House side to my brain still wants to focus on the 301s.
The only exception I can think of is if your previous domain violated the EMD Algorithm; exact keywords domain name for a website. I am wondering if Google devalued it and whatever backlinks that were helping your website?!? I am so paranoid about Google's filters...I swear it's like they have rat traps everywhere and when they go out to look at one caught in a specific trap, they audit it for field testing. You could be just unlucky?! Also the keywords you are competing with also would have a big factor if Google randomly sampled your site and audited it??? Any thoughts?
Also do you have a Webmaster Tools account? Google would report any directories that are not found. If they are there this would definitely prove my point of 301s not properly written. If so then click all of them and mark them as fixed and let Google recrawl.
*New websites with no much authority tend to do a Google dance. So if you're site is less than 12 months old or even 2 years old without a huge domain authority it could take a while to rebound.
-
Hi Chad,
I have an htaccess file that is in there already and it said that with the exception of the "Options+FollowSymLinks", so I added that line in. Could that be it? Is there something I could try next?
Thanks so much!
-
Looking at this I would definitely say or question the actual .htaccess rewite. It's a little clearer to me that your site lost back-links or page flow. Also the domain rank is an important metric of "authority". This is the stuff related to your website's actual content. Backlinks "deep or inner links" to various pages helps bolster the home page and "domain authority score". So I believe the actual 301 redirect technique is in question.
I know you said you did a redirect in the html files direct. I have never learned or heard of that technique (an example would be great aka markup/code); however, if your website is on an Apache Server, you would need to create .htaccess file and use this code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^newdomain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]Redirect /yourdirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory // for any other unquie content you want to redirect manually
*this is the way to do it, you can always Google or YouTube a video to show how to setup a .htaccess file on your server or on your cpu and then some special settings in filezilla (or whatever ftp software you use) so you can see the file. In FTP software .htaccess files are hidden, so you would create it and go nuts trying to locate the actual file. Filezillia I know has a feature or setting to unhide it so you can transfer it to the route of your server.
Let me know if this works!
-
Hi, thanks for your response. Yes, I did a 301 from the old domain to the new domain and the redesigned website. I had initially redirected the site using code in each of the html files, and that was fine, and my rank was climbing with the new site for awhile, before I did the 301 through the host. I went to ahrefs and copied and pasted the results below. I'm an SEO newb, so I'm not sure how to analyze the results.
Old Site:
URL Rank: 0Ahrefs Domain Rank: 0.17Backlinks: 58
Referring domains: 1New Site:
URL Rank: 7.9Ahrefs Domain Rank: 0Backlinks: 3Referring domains: 1
-
Hi Quick question, did you redirect 301 to new domain? I tried to read this, but I am just a tad unclear.
In theory a 301 to all or the exact anchor structure should pass all your page juice; however, sometimes doing this will enact a filter that spot checks for a link building footprint that violates Penguin Algorithm.
I know this sounds like a stretch, you might want to audit the link building you did initially. You can use Ahrefs (they have a free version) or if you want to take it to the next level use Authority Labs. They have great tools and reporting to help you look at your back-links.
If you have a ton of exact anchor matches and the same type of links on the same sites (site-wide-links), this can serve as a signal that could of had some of the links devalued.
The last option is if your previous url had exact anchors for keywords your ranked for. I am assuming you were able to obtain a branded url and this could affect to.
Reach back out to me, I can chat a little to help you hone in on the real issue.
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
-
Google Search Console - Sitemap
Hi all, Quick question. I'm trying to update my sitemap via Google Search Console using a sitemap.xml file that I've created with ScreamingFrog. However, when trying to submit it, it seems that Google only allows sitemaps that are located at a path within your domain (i.e. www.example.com/sitemap.xml) as opposed to being able to directly upload a sitemap.xml file.Is there any way that I can easily upload my sitemap.xml file? Or is there any easy way that I can upload the file to a path on my domain so I can upload via the URL?Any insight would be much appreciated!Best,Sung
Technical SEO | | hdeg0 -
Advice on improving ecommerce product detail pages to rank better in google search results.
Hi all, I run an ecommerce website, not a great ranked site, however i want to try and improve the product detail pages. To do this, i am first going to focus on 1 page (this one: http://goo.gl/eS62SU) If i type the product code directly into google.co.uk search i am on the 8th page (see https://www.google.co.uk/#q=hac-hfw2220r-z&start=70) which is a bit poor to say the least. I see this kind of thing for a lot of my products. Hence, i am going to see if over the next month or two i can get this one page moving up the rankings purely with on page optimisation. I would like to ask a couple of things: 1. Is there anything that jumps out at you as to why that product detail page could NOT ever rank well, i.e some code / set up of page etc that prevents google ranking it 2. Any advice you could give that might improve that page in rankings for its product code. FYI - I can not change the dynamic URL, I only have control over such things as product name / summary / features / spec etc any advice welcome
Technical SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Sitemaps: Good Image And Video Sitemap Generators
Hello, We are trying to update our sitemap. We have currently updated our XML and HTML sitemaps but would like to have an image and video sitemap also. Can anyone recommend a good image and video sitemap generator? Kind regards, | Deeana Radley Web Designer & SEO Assistant Phone: 01702 460047 Email: dee@solopress.com Google+: +DeeanaRadley Twitter: @DeeanaRadley |
Technical SEO | | SolopressPrint0 -
Wordpress versus html and google ranking
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress). My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
My blog page isn't ranking in Google
Hi, I noticed that my blog page on my site isn't in Google when i search for full URL link http://www.asggutter.com/blog/ instead i see page that isn't even working asggutter.com/sitemap.xml screen shot http://screencast.com/t/6OVFLwL8nTL How i can i fix that. Thanks
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
Google place listings and search results- quick question.
Has anybody else noticed that they are ranking better on 'places' yet they have dropped off in the actual search results? We've had no message through webmaster tools. The same seems to have happened to our competitors.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Sitemaps
Hi, I have doubt using sitemaps My web page is a news we page and we have thousands of articles in every section. For example we have an area that is called technology We have articles since 1999!! So the question is how can Make googl robot index them? Months ago when you enter the section technology we used to have a paginator without limits, but we notice that this query consume a lot of CPU per user every time was clicked. So we decide to limit to 10 pages with 1 records. Now it works great BUT I can see in google webmaster tools that our index decreased dramatically The answer is very easy, the bot doesn't have a way to get older technoly news articles because we limit he query to 150 records total Well, the Questin is how can I fix this? Options: 1) leave the query without limits 2) create a new button " all tech news" with a different query without a limit but paginated with (for example) 200 records each page 3) Create a sitemap that contain all the tech articles Any idea? Really thanks.
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Sitemaps for Google
In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL. Is this true? Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0