Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
-
Greetings to Moz Community.
Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog.
I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic.
After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links.
Today, all the positions went down for new domain.
My questions are:
1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or
2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue?
3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions?
I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
-
Hi there,
I've seen and heard a few examples similar to yours where someone has tried to remove a Google penalty by redirecting to a new domain. In most cases, it hasn't really worked and as you've described, it seems to take a bit of time for the negative links to the old domain to take effect on the new one. If you think about it from Google's perspective, this makes sense. If you could just remove a penalty by moving to a new domain and doing a redirect, then that would be far too easy in most cases.
If I were going to move to a new domain in order to escape a penalty, I think I'd probably not redirect the old pages and manually attempt to realign any good links I had so that they pointed at the new site. But this would definitely be a last resort, I'd rather do as much link removal and disavow as possible before trying to move to a new domain.
Cheers.
Paddy
- topic:timeago_earlier,26 days
-
Hi,
There have been cases were redirecting a domain that has been affected by an algorithmic penalty to a new domain has affected the new domain negatively.
Removing the 301 could remove the negative affect of the old domain, but any good links you have that point to the old domain will need to be changed to the new domain, so you still benefit from the good work you've done in the past.
You may also want to ensure that all of the links that are not in the disavow file are quality links and natural as there could be some that have slipped the net.
Regards
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 and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | Jan 15, 2018, 4:11 PM | rwat0 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | Aug 11, 2016, 8:57 AM | HeroDesignStudio0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | Apr 25, 2013, 5:49 PM | TroyW0 -
Switching from a .org to .io (301 domain redirect)
I'm considering switching my main site from a .org to .io address; the .org is an exact match domain which helped to kickstart it a few years ago and now has about 50% repeat visitors, but was thrown off the Apple affiliation program for trademark infringement. I've found and purchased a nice (non-infringing) .io domain, and I've read the advice here on how to properly 301 the old domain; but my question is - does it matter that it's .io? Is this going to significantly hurt my rankings, even when everything has been 301'd properly? Another thought I had is that I may actually come out better off in the long run, what with Google penalties being applied to exact match domains. Is this a ranking suicide? If so, I'm tempted to leave it as is; even without the affiliation, it's making a good amount every month in ad fees that I don't want to disrupt. Thanks all!
Technical SEO | Oct 2, 2012, 12:49 PM | w0lfiesmithUK0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | May 15, 2012, 10:26 AM | koamit0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | Apr 11, 2012, 8:30 AM | dballari0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | Feb 19, 2012, 4:19 AM | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0 -
How long does it take for rank to return after 301?
Hello all -- just looking for those who have implemented site-wide 301 redirects due to a domain change. I am about 2 weeks into mine and am seeing minimum 5, maximum 21 spot drops in many of my targeted terms. My pages have strong GPR, with most being 3 or higher. Anyone out there been able to track a ballpark of when rank will return? The 301 redirects were implemented correctly, with 1 to 1 setups in most cases. Google has updated the listings with the new domain name, but I'm taking a huge rank hit. Any experience on how long I can expect (I know it's different for every situation) would be great! Thanks.
Technical SEO | Oct 19, 2011, 2:12 PM | Bandicoot0