301 Redirect and SEO Rankings
-
I recently restructured my webpage URL's (about 300 ~ 75% of my total website) to make the URL paths more SEO friendly. Within a few hours of restructuring the pages, I did a 301 redirect to my old URL's and pointed them to the new pages. I have seen ~ 50% drop in organic traffic.
I started the restructuring exercise 14 days ago and finished it a few hours back. I have 3 questions:
- How long will it take for me to recover my old traffic. Will I recover most of it or some of it?
- Due to a glitch in the specified path, some old URL's were wrongly redirected (this happened with 9 pages to be exact). I will explain exactly what happened:
www.redirct.com/superseonow1 ---- redirected to ---- www.redirectnow.com/seonow1
**/superseonow was 301 redirected to /seonow. After 3 days I realize that /superseonow1 was actually /supernow1. The same thing happened to 9 pages - /superseonow2, /superseonow3 ..... **
I have removed all the wrong redirects. When I tried to enter the correct (old) paths now and 301 redirect them to the new paths, the page was not found using the old paths.
Should I redirect the old paths to the New ones even now?
3. Finally, in how much time after you change the page structure should you use the 301 redirect. Since I had two different teams working on this job, there could have been up to a 24 hour gap between the redirection.
-
Morgan,
Thank you for your insight. I've been pulling my hair out with how much traffic has been lost with the 301 redirects. I've come to the conclusion that we have to, in a way, start our SEO efforts over again specifically with the inbound links. Your comments just gave me a positive direction to move towards. Thank you.
- Conrad
-
Thanks for that Mike.
With regard to point no 2 - Page 1 is the old URL & Page 2 is the new URL. But a wrong Page 1 URL was entered to redirect it to page 2. There is no Page 3.
In effect, what has happened is that a page (which did not ever exist) was being redirected to Page 2 while the correct page 1 path was never redirected. Now I have removed all those (wrong) 301 redirects. But when I try to redirect the correct Page 1 URL path to Page 2 now, it does not redirect.
The address bar shows me a crazy long URL path (like its coming from cache) when I enter the page 1 URL path.
-
Whenever you change URLs, you'll see an initial drop in traffic as Google finds and reindexes these pages. You should see a bounce back in traffic after that, but it may not be what it was before if you used 301 redirects. 301 redirects only pass 85 - 90% of link equity, so all of the pages you've 301'd are now 10 - 15% less authoritative than they were before. Depending on how you were ranking before and the strength of your competitors, this loss of link equity could have negatively affected your position on SERPs. The only way to get this link equity back is to have all of the pages linking to your old pages link to the new pages (get them to directly link to your new page), or to get enough quality links to your new page that compensate for the loss in equity.
-
1. Assuming the pages are 100% exactly the same except for the URL, you should bounce back without a problem.
2. If i'm getting this right... Page 1 is the Old URL & Page 2 is the New URL but Page 1 accidentally redirected to Page 3. Now you want to know if Page 1 should be correctly redirected to Page 2 like originally intended? Yes.
3. While its always best to try to redirect as soon as possible, a 24 hour period of the page 404ing prior to redirection will not kill you.
Also you may want to update your Sitemap to swap the old URLs for the correct new URLs (if necessary), submit the updated sitemap to Google & Bing webmaster tools as needed, submit the new pages in Bing WMT & do some fetch requests in Google WMT to potentially speed up the crawl & indexing of the new pages.
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
-
Redirect question
Hi Everyone I've tried searching elsewhere in these forums for an answer to this but not having much luck - hope I'm not duplicating content! I get this message in Moz: "We have detected that the domain NappyValleyNet.com redirects to www.nappyvalleynet.com. We do not recommend tracking a redirect URL. Would you like to track www.nappyvalleynet.com for this campaign instead?" Is this a set-up issue on my side? I'm not sure what this means? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | NappyValleyNet0 -
Ranking a forum topic
We can rank a e-commerce product page,
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp
http://moz.com/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages Q: But how do we rank a forum topic?
For example i want to rank this page, http://moz.com/community/q/does-a-link-in-facebook-count-as-a-backlinkHow do i go about doing it? Is it similar to ranking a website?1 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Redirecting to homepage ok?
I deleted a bunch of category pages (renamed mostly actually and thought they'd be auto redirected like my blog posts are but they weren't) so I used a plugin that reroutes any 404 page to the homepage. Is that the best thing to do in this situation? Google Webmasters says there are about 84 404-errors and this should get rid of those right? Is there anything SEO BAD about doing it this way?
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
301, Canonical, and Page Authority
I have been trying to find an answer to this question for awhile now but I am having trouble. I have a clients site that I need to redirect and Canonical the pages to correct duplicate content issues and title tags however, the issue with this client is that some of the www. pages have a higher PA than non-www and the reverse is true. I am wondering if there is an issue with chasing the PA to get the highest PA per page (even if this means the site is going to be a mix of www. and non-www. pages)? I am extremely new to SEO so I apologize ahead of time if I missed this in the forum.
On-Page Optimization | | Highline_Ideas0 -
Best way to do a 301 redirect when the incorrect page has rank and FB likes
Due to a site structural problem with our CMS we have alot of duplicate content pages (1 page, with multiple urls). We are in the process of setting up 301 redirects to correct the problem. Meanwhile; one of the pages with the "incorrect" URL happens to be the page google favors and also has about 100 FB "likes". The question is: Are we better off keeping the "incorrect" URL for that particular page and redirect the other url to it? Both have a page rank of 3. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | foodsleuth0 -
Does microformats improve my ranking?
Hi, does Mircofromats like schema.org improve my ranking? If so, just because my products are listed in google/products? Regard
On-Page Optimization | | censeo0 -
SEO for spanish website
Hi, A client has given us the site http://www.comtranslations.com/Home.html for optimization. He wants to optimize only the spanish part ( the link is on the top right ). By clicking on the link Espanol, the url opened is - http://www.comtranslations.com/Principal.html. He wants seo for this website for spanish keywords. The keywords are - Traducción
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_2005
Traductor
traducir español inglés
traducción My question is how do we go about this ? Shall we purchase a software that translates spanish to english ? Thanks0