301 redirect hell.... How do you de-commission an old site
-
Hi SEO experts:
We operate a vacation rental website and around 1 year ago moved to a different platform. Because our pages are arranged by location (what we refer to as Locales) we need to put 301 redirects for all the old locale pages. So for example:
www.example.com/__Skeggness.cfm redirects to www.example/com/vacation-rentals/locale/skeggness
But here's the problem: We can't seem to get Google to drop those old __{locale_name}.cfm pages... even after over 12-months of the new site going live!
Other clues we've noticed:
-
The old underscore URLs show up in our SERP sub-links
-
Sometimes google shows the new page title and description but attributes it to the __{locale_name}.cfm URL (aghh!!!)
One suggestion we received was to use the URL removal tool in Google WMT.... But given we have 1,000's of locales i don't see that as being affective.
Questions:
-
Any suggestions on how to get Google to drop these old URLs and use the new ones?
-
Is this situation hurting our SEO? Or do you think its benign... and I should just take a deep breath.... and relax at little more...
-
-
Hi AABAB,
This is pretty common. Unfortuneatly, Google can keep your old URLs around for a long time, especially pages without much authority.
And yes, this can have a negative impact on your SEO - especially if Google in situations where Google is indexing both the old and new URLs, and hasn't processed the 301.
Muhammed has a good suggestion. Create or put up a sitemap of your old URLs, and submit this sitemap to Google via Webmaster Tools. The idea is that Google will re-crawl these URLs, finally register the 301, and drop those pages from the index.
The URL removal tool would be a great option if all the pages are in the same directory, such as /old-pages/xxxxx, as Google allows you to remove entire directories in bulk. But unfortunately it looks like your URLs are all at the root, so this isn't an option.
Regardless, hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I hope you can do the same for this situation also.
All we needed to to do is make Google to visit your OLD URLs for a last time and let it know that its 301'd to another URL.
So keep all your OLD URLs in HTML sitemap (not XML) until Google cache it again.
Also check when is the last date Google cached your OLD URLs
-
Thanks Muhammed:
A little bit of a different situation i think as you're referring to moving from one domain to another domain right? In our situation we're keeping domain - but all the URLs are changed from one site structure to another.
Also, nothing of the old site remains. We can't really run the two platforms side-by-side under the same domain.
-
Hi
I had this same issue with one of my website before.
Steps I done
-
Created 301 from all the other pages except the home page
-
Created a temporary Home page/ Landing page for telling human visitors that my old domain is moved to newdomain.com.
3) Created a HTML Sitemap in OLD domain for all the current indexed OLD URLs (everything is already redirected to newdomain.com) and placed it in olddomain.com/sitemap.html
At this time the only available 202 pages in my OLD site is the 1) Home page & 2) The HTML sitemap page
-
Created/Edit the current XML sitemap (OLD Site). Included only the above two pages/links in the XML sitemap. Updated the XML sitemap from Web Master Tools.
-
Waited 1-2 months. All my URLs got removed from SERP
-
At this stage I created 301 redirect to the remaining Home & Sitemap Page
Done!
I'm not sure this is a best practice or not, But it worked for me. Consider others feedback before doing this
-
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
-
What's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
If I 301 redirect a sub-page that is #1, will I risk losing SERP?
I have a site that for some reason Google decided to rank one of our articles #1 for a fairly competitive term. The article is kind of a BS blog post and I want to 301 it to our page about the topic as that's designed for conversion. If I do this, will we risk losing the ranking? If so, what are other options? Can I change the content of the ranked page to something closer to our landing page? Any advice is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dk80 -
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
301 redirects broken - problems - please help!
Hi, I have a bit of an issue... Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year. All well and good. However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated. Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+). It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it? Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
301 v/s 302 Redirection on Homepage (Multilingual)
Hello, Our website: http://www.luxresorts.com currently has a default 302 redirection to http://www.luxresorts.com/en. We would like to do a 301 redirection instead of a 302 to http://www.luxresorts.com. Our concern is that the site is multilingual and we wonder what effect would the 301 redirection have on search engine crawlers and how would this appear on SERP. When a search is done on Google.com, the English version of our website appears and when on Google.FR, the French version appears. Would the 301 redirection change the way our website appear on Google? Grateful if you could help us out in understanding the pros and cons/best practices for our concern. Thanks in advance. Tej Luchmun.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
New web site - 404 and 301
Hello, I have spent a lot of times on the forum trying to make sure how to deal with my client situation. I will tell you my understanding of the strategy to apply and I would appreciate if you could tell me if the strategy will be okay. CONTEXT I am working on a project where our client wants to replace its current web site with a new one. The current web site has at least 100 000 pages. The new web site will replace all the existing pages of the current site. What I have heard for the strategy the client wants to adopt is to 404 each pages and to 301 redirect each page. Every page would be redirect to a page that make sense in the new web site. But after reading other answers and reading the following comment, I am starting to be concerned: '(4) Be careful with a massive number of 301s. I would not 301 100s of pages at once. There's some evidence Google may view this as aggressive PR sculpting and devalue those 301s. In that case, I'd 301 selectively (based on page authority and back-links) and 404 the rest.' I have also read about performance issue ... QUESTION So, if we suppose that we can manage to map each of the old site pages to a page in the new web site, is a problem to do it? Do you see a performance issue or devaluation potential issue? If it is a problem, please comment the strategy I might considere to suggest: Identify the pages for which I gain links From that group, identify the pages, that gives me most of my juice 301 redirect them and for the other, create a real great 404 ... Thanks ! Nancy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
301 Redirect All Url's - WWW -> HTTP
Hi guys, This is part 2 of a question I asked before which got partially answered; I clicked question answered before I realized it only fixed part of the problem so I think I have to post a new question now. I have an apache server I believe on Host Gator. What I want to do is redirect every URL to it's corresponding alternative (www redirects to http). So for example if someone typed in www.mysite.com/page1 it would take them to http://mysite.com/page1 Here is a code that has made all of my site's links go from WWW to HTTP which is great, but the problem is still if you try to access the WWW version by typing it, it still works and I need it to redirect. It's important because Google has been indexing SOME of the URL's as http and some as WWW and my site was just HTTP for a long time until I made the mistake of switching it now I'm having a problem with duplicate content and such. Updated it in Webmaster Tools but I need to do this regardless for other SE's. Thanks a ton! RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinX0