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
-
Wix 301 Root Domain to HTTPS
We built our website on Wix, and Moz is saying that there is a 301 redirect chain issue: http://makeshark.com redirects to...
Moz Pro | | Makeshark
http://www.makeshark.com redirects to...
https://www.makeshark.com Is there a way to configure Wix to redirect http:// (with out the "www") straight to https://www?3 -
404 errors High Priority Issues in Moz Pro: change to 301 or not ?
Hi there, Moz Pro is showing us 404 errors on our site as High Priority Issues. These 404 errors regard deleted product pages, which we did not 301. Should we 301 them all backwards ? We have an ecommerce site. After reading How Should You Handle Expired Content? on Moz and a few other Q&A discussions I now know we should 301 each expired url and now we do so. My concern is with what was done in the past, and what we should do about it: for the past few years we have been leaving the pages on the site, creating a big amount of outdated url's without either content nor traffic in march our IT decided to delete these url's, and ask for a webpage removal in Google Search Console: we 301 only a 40 url's and 404 the other 3500 now 6 monthts after, we still have 2500 crawl errors in the Search Console, and Moz Pro finding each week new 404 errors Our SEO consultant says we should not bother about the errors shown in the Search Console. But I am concerned about these errors not reducing, and about Moz Pro High Priority Issues: should we 301 the url's to similar categories or products?
Moz Pro | | isabelledylag0 -
301 or canonical for multiple homepage versions?
I used 301 redirects to point several versions of the homepage to www.site.com. i was just rereading moz's beginners guide to seo, and it uses that scenario as an example for rel canonical, not 301 redirects. Which is better? My understanding is that 301s remove all doubt of getting links to the wrong version and diluting link equity.
Moz Pro | | kimmiedawn0 -
301 Permanently Moved Redirect
After completing a crawl of my website: www.getyourphotosonchavas.com I noticed that all of the pages had a 301 Redirect? There is this huge amount of what appears to be corrupted
Moz Pro | | rdominey
data for each of these pages: Please see the attached Crawl report and a test ran from a crawl spider. It looks like each page is a 301 redirect to itself? Can anyone please tell me what all this means? 301-Redirect-crawl.jpg 301-Redirects.jpg0 -
Www, non www, 301 redirects, Google webmaster tools & SeomozPro
arg! Any help on this topic would be greatly appreciated! This is in regards to sheffieldfurniture .com In October of 2011 I had our host set up a redirect for our site so all non www requests would be redirected to the www version and it works great (so it seems at least) Recently I signed up for SEOMOZPRO and when I started trying to track my organic results for various keywords I realized that Google has my site indexed in the non www format. Is this a problem? I’ve read you can tell google what your preferred domain is in Google Webmaster Tools, is that what I should be doing? Are there any negatives to doing that? I’m just confused as to why Google hasn’t noticed or acknowledged the redirect in 4 months. It makes me wonder if something isn’t working properly? I have since added a second SEOMOZPRO campaign with the non www version but I’m worried about having historical tracking issues if I then tell google to use the www version…
Moz Pro | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
301 redirect
Hello, I received a crawl diagnostic report for the website http://www.advancedemt.com here's what it said: Issue: (301 redirect) Page Title URL:http://advancedemt.com/ Redirects to:http://http://www.advancedemt.com/ I called seohosting.com for help: They checked my .httaccess file and did not find anything that would cause this 301 redirect.. Cpanel was evaluated for a 301 redirect and nothing there either. MyPHP Admin was checked for anything that could possibly cause this issue. They had a tech search the entire database and no luck on any issue that may be causing the SEOmoz software to pick up this 301 redirect. We checked the Wordpress settings... No discrepancies. Wordpress permalinks... No problems..... We checked Google to see if they may have indexed the site for the error with no luck... I told the SEO Hosting staff that the canonical feature that has been built into Wordpress would prevent this redirect from allowing Google to index the site with this error. Is it possible that the crawl diagnostics is wrong??? Please help... Best regards, Jeff Bratcher (404) 520-2385
Moz Pro | | Jeff10 -
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