How do I recover from a double 301 mistake?
-
We have a site that was ranking top 10 for 15 KW and top 20 for about 40. We decided to restructure the site to create silos. The old site used a plugin to create ".html" pages and the juice in Google was all on those pages.
We asked our developer to eliminate the plugin / .html and forward the .html pages to our new structure.
Instead, he took a shortcut and did a mass forward in code which resulted in all pages - such as "example.com/mypage.html" now forwarding to "example.com/mypage/" - He then did a 301 redirect from those pages with the "/" such as example.com/mypage/ to "example.com/my-new-page/". He did this for over 500 pages.
To make matters worse, he mis-mapped about 100 pages and Google saw them as 404s, then in fixing those errors, new ones kept popping up. Those are now fixed.
The net result is that we dropped like a stone on all of our rankings.
Moving forward, do you think we can regain ground by manually doing 301s for the original .html pages to their new locations and eliminating the interim step?
What would be your suggestions to recover as quickly as possible?
-
Gotcha, ok well that's a relief. In troubleshooting the drop we are looking at a few more factors. Do any of these sound suspicious?
1. In redirecting everything, our developer was sloppy. There were slug conflicts all over the place and this resulted in hundreds of 404s and mis-directed pages (pages redirected to y instead of x), which he only corrected after we manually found the 404s. We went through 5 or 6 rounds of this.
2. We had over 100 pages without titles and he ran some script that rewrote a lot of existing titles. When we discovered this, he went back and fixed all the titles but only after Google reported 100+ duplicate titles.
3. We installed an internal link building plugin (that we've since deleted) and created business rules for cross linking. This resulted in hundreds of cross links with exact anchor text of the slug / page titles. As mentioned, we've since rolled this back but since the site only has about 50 external backlinks, wondering if the internal link building over-optimized and triggered a penalty. If this is something you think they'd ding us for, now that we've fixed the internal links, do you think Google will give us back some juice? Or is it gone daddy gone?
Otherwise, our pages rank 95%-98% optimized according to Moz and we have zero technical issues at this stage.
-
To be honest, it all looks correct and that would have been the way I did it. If Google is currently not ranking the correct URL, it'll likely update when they take the 301 into account when they next recrawl the page.
It might be a factor in why rankings have dropped but it's likely to pick back up again when their index is updated. My advice is to hold tight and hope it all fixes itself soon.
All the best,
Sean
-
Thanks Sean,
No, he first redirected the .html pages in code so:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+([^.]+).html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1/ [R=301,L]So 500+ pages were redirected from .html to /
Step 2, he made manual 301s from the / to the new structure so for instance "example.com/mypage/" redirected to "example.com/new-parent/my-new-page/"
But Google has ranked example.com/mypage.html
So the question is - would doing the above be a contributor to losing our ranks? If so, would we benefit by manually linking "example.com/mypage.html" to "example.com/new-parent/my-new-page/" and therefore skipping the interim step?
Second, you mentioned having so many redirects could be problematic. Our reason for the change was to create a hierarchy - before we started, there were 500 pages with no parent...no hiearchy at all. So we created a silo structure and a proper site map. The 500 pages now belong to this hiearchy and the slugs are all different than before. Do you have a suggestion for a better way to do the 301s other than manually in this case?
Thanks for the advice!
-
Hey there,
My advice would be to minimize those redirect chains as soon as you can, not just for potential SEO benefit but more to lessen server stress and speed up page load.
Interestingly, chained 301s don't lose equity in the eyes of a search engine now (see updates below) so it's interesting that you're seeing such a fluctuation.
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
For the .html to trailing slash pages, did you say that he did a page-to-page remap for all of them instead of putting a redirect rule in place to catch them all? That seems like a crazy thing to put in place! Your redirect file (htaccess or similar) must be enormous!
Hope that helps,
Sean
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
-
Only 2 Inbound Links which are the Redirect 301 Links
Hello Everyone, We're having a serious Problem with the ranking of our website so we started testing the website in different Tools. Almost all of the tools say our website works great and in comparision to our competitors we win in almost every test – but we rank behind them. The only thing that makes me wonder is the fact that our website has only 2 Inbound links (Open Site Explorer) when the link source is set to only internal. And the only links shown are 2 links that come from the old http (we're using https) and redirect 301 to our https. No other links – in other tools we have around 80 internal links to our rmain https-webadress. Does anyone have an idea where that comes from? I'm afraid this might be our issue in ranking behind of lots of our competitors. Lokking forward to your ideas and suggestions.
Moz Pro | | Franksen3o3
Greets Frank0 -
How do I set-up a 301 redirect?
Moz alerted me to two 404 errors on our website. I am now trying to place a 301 redirect on them. How would I go about accomplishing?
Moz Pro | | EverlastingChanges0 -
Crawlers reporting upper case letter url versions although these have been 301'd to lower case !?
Hi I have a client e-com site who's dev platform is on a windows server Their product pages have been auto-named after the product title, with the first letter in each word being upper case, which has hence translated to the URL having upper cases instances too. I asked them to set up 301 redirects for all url's that had upper case instances to lower case versions, which they say they have done. However I'm still seeing url's with upper case instances showing up in webmaster tools and moz crawl reports but when I copy & paste them into a browser they do redirect to, & resolve in, the lower case version. Its also upper case versions reported in the Google cache! So how come webmaster tools & Moz etc are reporting the upper case versions, surely if redirected it should be the lower case versions All Best Dan
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Cleaning Up Bad 301 External Links From Old Site
A relatively new site I'm working on has been hit really hard by Panda, due to over optimization of 301 external links which include exact keyword phrases, from an old site. Prior to the Panda update, all of these 301 redirects worked like a charm, but now all of these 301's from the old url are killing the new site, because all the hyper-text links include exact keyword matches. A couple weeks ago, I took the old site completely down, and removed the htaccess file, removing the 301's and in effect breaking all of these bad links. Consequently, if one were to type this old url, you'd be directed to the domain registrar, and not redirected to the new site. My hope is to eliminate most of the bad links, that are mostly on spammy sites, that aren't worth linking to. My thought is these links would eventually disappear from G. My concern is that this might not work, because G won't re-index these links, because once they're indexed by G, they'll be there forever. My fear is causing me to conclude I should hedge my bets, and just disavow these sites using the disavow tool in WMT. IMO, the disavow tool is an action of last resort, because I don't want to call attention to myself, since this site doesn't have a manual penalty inflected on it. Any opinions or advise would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | alrockn0 -
How long will it take for Page Rank (or Page Authority) to flow via a 301 redirect?
I've recently redeveloped a static site using WordPress and have created 301 redirects for the original urls to the new urls. I know I won't get all the value passed via the 301, but I'm hoping some will. Any idea how long this may take? It's been nearly a month since the changeover so wondering if it would be weeks, months or more?
Moz Pro | | annomd0 -
301 redirect question from a newb
So, I've been blogging for almost 3 years now. I've always used wordpress, but recently changed from a ProPhoto theme to a Woo Theme (Editorial...don't know if that matters). I've signed up for the SEOmoz website and HOLY CROW I have problems with my website out the wazoo. I am tackling issues one at a time and one of my issues seems to be 301 redirects. If you'd like to see a screen shot of the crawl diagnostics, check it out the attachment. If you'd like screen shots of anything else, just let me know. I'm not sure I'm reading the chart right, but it seems to say that all of my redirecting problems are because my links are redirecting from an http://www..... to a http://http://www... I've been in my wordpress blog post back end and can't seem to figure out how they A. Got like this. and B how to fix it. If I'm reading the chart wrong...definitely let me know. Thank you guys so much in advance! Screen%20Shot%202012-01-01%20at%202.28.19%20PM.png
Moz Pro | | TerraDawn0 -
Why are SEOmoz Pro Keyword Ranking reports different between two 301-linked URLs?
Hi, My main domain is www.dancenut.com. I have this 301 URL redirected to www.dancenut.com/boston/. I set up an SEOmoz Pro campaign for each of these URLs in order to see if they were being treated differently in any way. In most cases the report results are identical, or the small differences are understandable. However, there is one big difference between the two sets of campaign reports. In the Keyword Ranking reports, the data for the Bing and Yahoo! reports are identical, but the data for the Google reports are dramatically different. Out of 21 keywords, 9 are listed in the top 50 for www.dancenut.com, but only 2 are listed in the top 50 for www.dancenut.com/boston/ (the specific positions are the same for the 2 keywords that are listed for both). Does this make any sense? Could the SEOmoz Pro data be wrong? If not, then I'm suspicious that Google may not be interpreting the 301 redirect properly. I don't think this could be fully explained by a 1-10% reduction in link juice due to the 301 because I have one keyword for which my site ranks #1 in Google, Bing, and Yahoo! with www.dancenut.com, but it doesn't even rank in the top 50 in Google with www.dancenut.com/boston/. And why would these differences only exist for Google? Any insight would be much appreciated! Andrew
Moz Pro | | dancenut0 -
How can I update On Page Optimization Reports following 301 redirect?
A few weeks ago I ran the SEOMoz On Page Optimization Reports for one of my sites. At the time, the site homepage was duplicated .com/ and .com/index.html (I know!). The On Page Optimisation Reports I ran at the time obviously included both as individual pages. I've now corrected the duplicate issue with a 301 but the On Page Optimization Reports are still looking at the rankings for .com/index.html and therefore showing "not in top 50" for keywords where I'm actually ranking 1st - any idea how I can get the reports to update so they don't continue to look for .com/index.html? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | trbaldwin0