301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?
-
Hi,
When pushing our new site live, most of the 301 redirections got done too late for several reasons. Understandably, our site rankings in google have taken a hit now.
So far we have just tried to perfectly optimize the pages that used to rank well (They weren't even optimized before and were still ranking) , to get our positions back.
But does anyone have an idea about what else we could do? Is there a recommended "action plan" when someone is late with their 301 redirections?
-
Hi, Tom!
Thanks for the quick response - Yes we have implemented the 301 regardless, so I hope we will see our rankings improve again
They actually already have, I checked GA and organic traffic has gone up 100% in the last week, when compared to the previous week. So something must be happening Thank You,
Johan
-
Hi Johan,
As Tom says definately make sure your 301s are in place. Especially for a large site you will want to submit a new sitemap to help indexing the new urls and a user friendly 404 page perhaps noting the redesign and linking to the main areas of the new site would be a good idea if you expect to still be getting traffic to old urls that are not covered by 301s for some reason. The basics in other words, but worth a mention.
-
Hi Johan
Have you implemented the 301s regardless? It may take time, but there should be no reason for the link equity to inevtiably pass to the new URLs and for Google to give the new URLs the same credit, and possibly ranking, as before.
If the redirections are in place and rankings don't recover in, say, a month, then the course of action would be to optimise the new URLs as you would have done previously - making sure the on-page is all in order and then earning high quality links.
There's no magic solution to implementing 301s at a later stage and it works on the same SEO principles as before, but so long as the 301s are now in place then Google should (emphasis on should) eventually give your new URLs the strength the previous URLs had and hopefully promote it in the rankings.
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 -
Redirecting traffic to https
Hey! i was wondering, should i force all traffic to https address? i know that overall a better secured website will rank better since it earns more trust from users which means less bounce rate and the list of benefits is endless..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
but should i FORCE ALL traffic to a https? or maybe only force a http to https? or not at all?2 -
Content suggestions and topics
Hello, In the list of topics that moz recommends, how many of the topics that are recommend should I cover just 2 or 3 or 10 of them ? is the more the better ? Then let's say one of the topic recommended is tennis should I just add the topic tennis once in my content or do I need to cover this topic multiple times ? meaning write the topic tennis 3 times across my content ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
301 Redirect? How to leverage the traffic on our old domain.
I've seen multiple questions about this but there's a few different answers on ways to approach it. Figured I'd personally ask for our situation. Any advice would be appreciated. We formed a new company with a new name / domain while at the same time buying an existing company in our industry. The domain and site of the company we acquired is ranking for some valuable keywords and still getting a significant amount of traffic (about half of what our new site is getting). A big downside has been, when they moved that site to a different server, something happened to where the site became uneducable so it's full of bad pricing and information. Because of that, we've had a maintenance page up for a little bit because it was generating calls to our sales team (GOOD) but the customer was having seen incredibly incorrect information (BAD) Rather than correcting those issues or figuring out why the site is un-editable, we just want to find a way where we can leverage that traffic and have them end up at our new site. Would we 301 redirect the entire domain to our new one? If we did that would the old domain still keep the majority of it's page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HuskyCargo1 -
301 Redirect from unused domain
Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19771 -
301 Redirect To Another 301 Redirect
Hi, We have a client with an old domain that they want to redirect to their primary domain. They also have a few older domains pointing to the old domain. Do you recommend leaving them as redirects that point to the old domain? This will create a redirect to a redirect situation. Or, is it better to go ahead and redirect those older domains to the primary one's, removing one layer of redirect? Thank you! Jessie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
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