301 Re-Directs Puzzling Question on Page Returned in Search Results
-
On our website, www.BusinessBroker.net, we have 3 different versions of essentially the same page for each of our State Business for Sale Pages. Back in August, we did a test and did 301 redirects using 5 States. For a long while after doing the redirects, the pages fell out of Google search results - we used to get page 1 rankings. Just recently they started popping back up on Page 1. However, I noticed that the new page meta data is not what is being picked up -- here is the example.
Keyword Searched for in Google -- "Maine Business for Sale"
Our listing shows up on Page 1 -- # 8 Result
URL returned is correct preferred version: - http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
However, the Page Title on this returned page is still the OLD page title -
OLD TITLE -- maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker
Not the title that is designated for this page -
New Title - Maine Businesses for Sale - Buy or Sell a Business in ME | BusinessBroker.net
Ditto for Meta Description.
Why is this happening?
Also have a problem with lower case showing up rather than upper case -- what's causing this?
http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
versus -- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks, MM
-
thanks - we did some more research on our end and our developer found this --
The problem with the title, description and keywords is because we updated these for just Wyoming, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine and Florida. I made the mistake of assuming the URL would always have the proper case of the state in the URL but as we have discovered that was a bad assumption. The code was looking for those 5 states with the first letter capitalized and the link from Google was not so it defaulted to the format for the other states that we haven't changed yet. I have fixed that code so now those 5 states will display the correct title, description and keywords regardless of the case of the state in the URL. I will update the live site in the morning so this issue will be taken care of. We will still need to discuss the how best to handle the URLs that Google is getting with the incorrect case.
-
I can't say for sure what happened last time since I am not exactly sure what you did. But as long as the 301 redirects are set up correctly and Google is not having any trouble accessing and crawling them, then you shouldn't experience any major negative results over the long term.
Now that I've read your initial post again, I see that the Maine page is one of the States you tried to redirect as part of your test. However, as I posted above, the old page is not being 301 redirected to the new page, so Google may have dropped your site in the rankings since you essentially had two very similar pages competing against each other for the same terms.
-
The page that is ranking #8 in Google for me is http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx, and on that page, it has the old Title tag and it is not redirected to the version of the URL with the new Title tag.
When I visit http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx, I am seeing the new Title tag.
Since these are two completely different pages you will need to 301 redirect the URL with the old Title tag to the new one. That should solve your problems.
-
follow up question regarding the upper and lower case question from our web developer ---
The question hasn't been how to do it. The question is what happens to all of the pages that are indexed by Google improperly when we do this? Are we going to see the same thing as when we redirected the states with a big drop for 6 months?
Keith
-
Thanks for the response, appreciate it. I'm pretty confident we re-directed the non-preferred URLs to this preferred page --
http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
This page has the updated Title Tag, Meta Description, etc. however, is not the one that shows up in the Google Search Result for "Maine Business for Sale"
-
I visited the page http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx and the Title tag in the HTML is "maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker" so perhaps you did not publish the new versions of the Title tags?
As for your lower case/upper case issue, I went to both URLs and they both resolve to an active page. I would suggest making the URLs consistent to minimize the risk of duplicate content. First, I would set the designated URL in the rel="canonical" tag for each page. And depending on the type of server, I would suggest forcing the URLs to 301 redirect to a single version of the URL. Here is a good blog post on how to address this specific issue - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/common-technical-seo-problems-and-how-to-solve-them
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
-
Google Search Console Site Property Questions
I have a few questions regarding Google Search Console. Google Search Console tells you to add all versions of your website https, http, www, and non-www. 1.) Do I than add ALL the information for ALL versions? Sitemaps, preferred site, etc.? 2.) If yes, when I add sitemaps to each version, do I add the sitemap url of the site version I'm on or my preferred version? - For instance when adding a sitemap to a non-www version of the site, do I use the non-www version of the sitemap? Or since I prefer a https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml do I use it there? 3.) When adding my preferred site (www or non-www) do I use my preferred site on all site versions? (https, http, www, and non-www) Thanks in advance. Answers vary throughout Google!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
What to keep in mind: to 301 redirect every page in an entire online store
Hello, I've got to put a 301 redirect on every page in an entire online store. We're moving to a better premade cart. Who has experience with this? How do I not lose traffic, if that is possible? What do I need to keep in mind? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Getting too many links on Google search results, how do I fix?
I'm a total newbie so I apologize for what I am sure is a dumb question — I recently followed Moz suggestions for increasing visibility on my site for a specific keyword by including that keyword in more verbose page descriptions for multiple pages. This worked TOO well as now that keyword is bringing up too many results in Google for these different pages on my site . . . is there a way to compile them into one result with the subpages like for instance, the attached image for a search on Apple? Do I need to change something in my robots.txt file to direct these to my main page? Basically, I am a photographer and a search for my name now brings up each of my different photo gallery pages in multiple results, it's a little over the top. Thanks for any and all help! CNPJZgb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jason54540 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
Fixing A Page Google Omits In Search
Hi, I have two pages ranking for the same keyword phrase. Unfortunately, the wrong page is ranking higher, and the other page, only ranks when you include the omitted results. When you have a page that only shows when its omitted, is that because the content is too similar in google's eyes? Could there be any other possible reason? The content really shouldn't be flagged as duplicate, but if this is the only reason, I can change it around some more. I'm just trying to figure out the root cause before I start messing with anything. Here are the two links, if that's necessary. http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury/ http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ Best, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Question about Google Search Results
I have a question regarding google search results. I have a website www.911signalusa.com when you type this into google search box the URL comes up repeatedly. I have several competitors here is one of them www.emergencycity.com when you type in their name it only come up as the first result. How did our SEO guys make this happen? I have another site tha when we type in the URL it only comes up as the first result. However when you do site:www.------.com All of these site are indexed in Google. It is not causing any problem we knoe of but it appears to me that our 1 site has it better? Or is it that maybe there are very minimal links to the site? Thank you for your time and consideration in answering my quesiton.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scamper0 -
Site Search Results in Index -- Help
Hi, I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.) Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed. I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links. But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be: Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?) Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good? Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability. Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC1 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0