Redirect effecting ranking?
-
I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us
The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords.
Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page
-
Which leads me stumped as to whats stopping these two subfolders being ranked.. we're no.1 for branded keywords in the US for some pages on example.com/us and not even ranked in the UK for example.com/uk for the same keywords.
-
If you had any type of duplicate content penalty - or other Panda related "slap" - it would effect the entire domain's rankings, not just the one subfolder where the duplicate content problems existed. I've never heard of an algorithmic penalty that only effected one area of a website… it almost always slaps the entire domain.
-
While the duplicate content issues were on the same domain, they were for a sub-folder. It doesn't seem to have effected another sub-folder on the site (example.com/us) so my feeling is that this is a different issue.
-
In general, redirects dilute the link "juice" - or authority - a page has accrued from links and other search-related metrics. When you redirect that page to another, all of the authority does not flow to the new page. A portion of that page's link value/authority does flow to the new page. The majority is lost.
However, in your case, it sounds like there are many other things affecting your website's performance in SERPs. I'd expect your duplicate issues - even if recently resolved - to hold your website back for a time longer, but if all those other issues clear, yes, the redirect could be the main reason for the effected ranking.
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
-
How to remove 302 redirects in Magento?
We're seeing a couple of temporary redirects. One for the http pointing to https. Another for /checkout pointing to/checkout/cart. We don't have an internal dev so not sure how to remove these. Would anyone know? I've set up the 301s but they're not overriding and I'm still seeing the issues in the crawl. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | LASClients0 -
Subdomain redirect
Hey guys, I was thinking about creating subdomains for one of my websites. I want to divide my website in different subdomains (blog.[site].com / directory.[site].com / etc.) but I'm afraid that this will negatively impact my rankings. My blog for example has a lot of supporting content for my products and services that are primarily hosted on the homepage. Have you guys ever created subdomains at a later stage of your website's existence? What kind of impact did you notice? Would you recommend it? Thanks a million!
Technical SEO | | Nizar.1 -
Redirecting pages from a website to another
Hello Moz community, I’ve got a question and hope you can help! I’ve been working to improve my website’s ranking for the keywords “singing lessons London”. My current website url is http://www.sonic-crew-london.com and the page dedicated to the singing lessons is http://www.sonic-crew-london.com/booking/singinglessons.php I’ve recently bought the url http://www.singing-lessons-london.com which I hope will help to climb Google’s ranks a bit more easily for my chosen keywords. I thought I could redirect the old singing page to the new url. Is that something you would recommend me to do? Is there any specific procedure I should follow to make sure the transition runs smoothly? Any help really appreciated! Many thanks
Technical SEO | | SonicCrewLondon0 -
Fix redirect loop
Hi,
Technical SEO | | bshanahan
I've been trying set up a 301 redirect from http://domestiquecap.com to www.domestiquecap.com but one was already set up by my client the other way around (from www to http://) so it's creating a redirect loop. However, we don't know where that original redirect was set up. The htaccess file doesn't appear to have the redirect and neither does the control panel of our hosting company. We need to turn off that original redirect so that I can instead redirect to the www subdomain. Where else could this 301 redirect have been set up? Is there a tool to diagnose where the 301 redirect was created so that I can turn it off? I am thinking maybe it was created via the domain registrar (GoDaddy) since the client has the login there and hasnt shared it with me.0 -
Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?
Hi Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
IP redirects
My website, on a .com domain, displays a different language/content depending on the IP of the user. For example, if someone is browsing my web from Spain, it will show the spanish content, and so on. Does anyone has an idea on how will Google index my pages? Their servers being located in the US, I assume the bot will only crawl and index the english content. How can I tell the bots to do the same for the other languages/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Alemoto0 -
How long before rankings return?
We recently had a redesign of our website and moved it from a static html site to WordPress. During the development the WordPress installation sat on a sub-domain. Our programmer and designer had the privacy setting inside WordPress checked so the search engines would not crawl the pages while being developed to avoid duplicate content. Fast forward two weeks when new site replaces old. Guess what privacy setting was not fixed. So about 3 days after the site is live organic traffic drops by 80%. Do a little research and all of our great rankings are gone. Notice that our page rank is also gone...Hmm... Upon further inspection the noindex tag is on every page of the site. It's now removed and has been 3-4 days. I've resubmitted inside webmaster tools and I'm just curious what y'all think the likelihood is that everything will come back to how it was before.
Technical SEO | | jmacek070 -
Lost ranking once optimised a page
Hello, we're a new member of SEOMOZ and love it but have a problem. Obviously the reason for joining is to learn more about SEO and hopefully get our website ranked a lot better than it currently is. However, one particular page we've chosen to optimise (based on your tips) has since lost ranking and we can no longer find it in the searches. Is there a reason for this? We've only made the on page changes you suggested and also added more external and internal links so I can't understand why it would no longer be listed in the searches? I look forward to your reply/feedback. Many thanks Peter
Technical SEO | | mybabyradio0