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 Your sitemap has all URLs that look outdated (.htm extension and have "www" while the internal links in your site do not have "www") 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
-
How effective are 301 redirects in passing page rank?
I have a blog which is ranking well for certain terms, and would like to repurpose it to better explain these terms it is ranking for, including updating the url to the new term the blog will be about. The plan being to 301 redirect the old url to new. In the past, I've done this with other pages, and have actually lost much of the rankings that I had earned on the original URL. What is your take on this? Maybe repurpose blog, but maintain original URL just to be on the safe side? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
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 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
301 redirect adding trailing slash to url
I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders. e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/ Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened? Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
Technical SEO | | TimHolmes
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem? Any info would be apreciated.0 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0