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.
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
-
Hi Guys
After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR.
We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected.
To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following:
- In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side.
- In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect.
- In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page.
In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!?
Thanks in advance.
Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
-
Chris - thanks for the heads up. It's been a month since we made the changes and we haven't started to crawl back up the rankings yet. I'll see how it goes and report back.
Cheers
Dave
-
Dan - thanks for the info. Looks like we have some tidying up and a few tasks to do!
-
I was talking about Google but looking at the reports, we have suffered with Bing and Yahoo too.
-
I would have set up 301s in .htaccess.
However, I think you may just be citing a correlation not causation. You have some WAY bigger issues:
1. The homepage can be arrived at by:
- paysubsonline.com
- www.paysubsonline.com
- paysubsonline.com/index.aspx <--returns a 404
- www.paysubsonline.com/index.php <-- loads a "coming soon" page, completely different than homepage, though which you can get to - https://paysubsonline.com/howitworks.php and others etc...
- www.paysubsonline.com/index.html <---returns a 404
Redirect all possible variations on the homepage to one singular version and fix that old site that's showing up.
2. Your sitemap has all URLs that look outdated (.htm extension and have "www" while the internal links in your site do not have "www") <--update your XML sitemap and resubmit to webmaster tools
3. You have not robots.txt file.
4. You have no canonical tag - which would be the last possible line of defense against all the duplicate content.
I'd start with those things, hope that helps.
-Dan
-
Yes, that is a very good point.
-
Dave,
Assuming your 301 redirects are technically correct then it will take time for your new page URLs to be indexed by the major search engines.
Be aware that your rankings may not come back 100% as they were before the change.
A 301 redirect does not pass all the PR and linkjuice as many SEO's assume. You can read about it in this interview with Matt Cutts and in this illustrated summary from Rand on SEOMoz
From my personal experience what you are seeing is normal just keep doing the good work you are currently doing a quite Google search with info:yournewdomain will show if your new domain has been added to the index.
-
May I know which search engine rankings fell off the radar?
If it is the rankings of the old URLs, then it might be because 301 redirection would pass your link juice from the old to the new pages. It might also be good to see your new page's rankings.
It might take a little time for the passing of link juice from old to new and thus is the reason for the change in 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
-
Redirection chain and Javascript Redirect
Hi, A redirection chain is usually defined as a page redirecting to another page which itself is another redirection. URL1 ---(301/302)---> URL2 ---(301/302)---> URL3 But what about Javascript redirect? They seem to be a different beast: URL1 ---(301/302)---> URL2 ---(200 then Javascript redirect)---> URL3 From what I know if the javascript redirect is instant Google counts it as a 301 permanent redirection, but I'm still not sure about if this counts as a redirection chain. Most of the tools (such as moz) only see the first redirection. So is that scenario a redirection chain or no?
Technical SEO | | LouisPortier0 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Redirect URLS with 301 twice
Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
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 | | TroyW0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
HELP: Wrong domain showing up in Google Search
So i have this domain (1)devicelock.com and i also had this other domain (2)ntutility.com, the 2nd domain was an old domain and it is not in use anymore. But when i search for devicelock on Google, the homepage devicelock.com does not exist. Only ntutility.com comes up. I asked one of the developer how the redirect is happening from the old domain to the new one and he told me its through a DNS forward. And there is no way to have an .htacess file to set up a 301 instead. Please help!
Technical SEO | | Devicelock0 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0 -
301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0