301 redirects tanked our site on google - what now?
-
We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics.
So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword.
Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages.
What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it?
Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise.
Jean
-
Thanks so much for your response - and for reminding me to be patient.
I've tried leaving the pages intact with a link to the new url and found that the five or six pages of old vintages all pointing to the new page resulted in hundreds of almost empty pages.
I thought that it was effecting my SEO, having so many pages with almost nothing on them.
I have to put the info about all the older vintages on the current product so the customer can get the full story. So I can't put the info about each past vintage on its one page and then put all of the content on the current page.
Google counts that as duplicate content.
I'm not sure what you mean by "archive them"?
Thanks again,
Jean
-
Thanks so much for your words of wisdom.
Re the url with 2008 in the title - the "2008" is an unfortunate consequence of the way we named the pages originally. It is the most relevant page and lists the 2010 wine. This is not a page that was incorrectly redirected, the url's name was poorly designed.
Should I rename the pages to leave off the vintage? Ideally I'd think the url would be something like "shea-wine-cellar-homer-pinot-noir.html and not have the vintage in it at all. But, renaming all of those differently dated pages would require 301's, wouldn't it? That's a lot of 301s - a lot of the pages have the wrong vintage in the url.
Re why google is liking the blog post link that seems less on target versus the wine's own page - this has been happening since 1)I started posting good fresh content on the blog everyday; and 2) especially since the redirects - it's been more in the last few days than ever before.
I'll check, but the 301's were put i place by a very very good IT guy.
Again, thank you so much.
Jean
-
Yes, that is the information desired, thank you.
I do notice the 2009 review is more then double the length of the 2010 review, which is thin by comparison. Otherwise the page seems fine.
I tried navigating to other pages such as Oregon > Oregon Pinot Noir > Highest Rated Pinots and selected the first link "Shea Wine Cellars Homer Pinot noir 2010" but notice the URL is http://www.northwest-wine.com/Shea-Wine-Cellars-Homer-Pinot-noir-2008.html.
The link still shows 2008. Not a big deal per se, but it leads to questions about the redirects. Are you sure they were performed properly?
More importantly, it seems there is at least some keyword cannibalization on your site. I tried searching Google.com for "Shea Wine Cellars Homer Pinot noir 2010" which is an exact title match to the above page. Your site ranks 11th for the term but a different page appears: http://www.northwest-wine.com/wine/2012/05/the-shea-vineyard-2010-homer-estate-block-31-block-7/
Further analysis is required to determine the root cause of the issue. I would suggest first checking the 301s to ensure they were performed properly. I would also check your site for similar keywords to the redirected pages. When I search your site using your search box for "Shea Wine Cellars Homer Pinot noir 2010" the only page that comes up is the 2008.html page. Clearly Google.com feels the other page is more relevant.
-
Hold tight and give yourself at least a week before evaluating the result of your change.
I wouldn't redirect those myself. I'd just archive them, tack on a sold out notice, tweak the copy and offer a link to the new url.
-
http://www.northwest-wine.com is the site.
Here's an example of an old page that has not yet been redirected:
http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Willamette-Valley-Pinot-noir-2009.html
Here's the new page we'll redirect it to when it is sold out:
http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Pinot-noir-WV-2010.html
You can see why we are redirecting - the older page has the same content as the newer one, except the newer one has the additional content for the new vintage. I'm consolidating all of the older vintage tasting notes onto one page with the newer ones.
Is this the info you need? Thanks SO much for the quick response.
Jean
-
In order to offer any tangible advice, we would need to examine your site along with an example of an old article along with the new page which replaced it.
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
-
Best Place to Redirect 301 to?
Hey Everyone! I have an old site with hundreds of blog posts that are very spammy (duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content). I am going to redirect them and delete them from WordPress but I'm wondering where is the best place to redirect them to? Home page, other posts, other pages...? Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | adamxj21 -
301 Redirect - Technical Question
I have recently updated a site and for the url's that had changed or were not transferring I set up 301 redirects in the htaccess file as follows This one works - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing But this one doesn't - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors/equine http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/application/equestrian/ What it does is change the url to this instead http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/equine ..... which returns a 404 page not found error The server is nginx based server and we have moved from a joomal platform to a wordpress platform I would be grateful for any ideas
Technical SEO | | paulie650 -
Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder
Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
Technical SEO | | aactive
subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks0 -
Crawl Diagnostic: Notices about 301 redirects
There are detected five 301 redirects on my site and I want to understand why this is happening? And is this important to fix? http://domain.cl/subfolder ---- redirects to ----> http://domain.cl/subfolder/ What does this tell me "/" I am very curious 🙂 Thanks for every answer
Technical SEO | | inlinear
Holger0 -
Will a timed 301 redirect work for Googlebot?
Our client is changing brand names and domain names. We know we need to 301 redirect the old domain, but for marketing reasons we want people to see a short message saying that the brand has changed and that they will be redirected. Example: | | Our concern is how, or if, Googlebot will intepret the redirect. Will this accomplish our SEO objective of moving the value of the page to the new domain, or do we need to do just a plain old fashioned 301 redirect and not even let the page load? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Google Panda and ticketing sites: quality of content
Hi from Madrid! I am managing the Marketing Department of a ticketing site in Europe similar to Stubhub.com. We have thousands of events and, until now, we used templates for their descriptions. A lot of events share the same description with minor changes. They also have a lot of tickets on sale, so that's unique content different on each event. Now the last Google Panda update hit Europe and I was wondering if that will affect us a lot. It's hard to tell for now, because we are in the middle of the summer and the volume of searches in our industry depends decreases a lot during this time of the year. I know that ideally we should have unique descriptions but that would need a lot of resources and they are not important for our users: they just want to know the venue, the time and the price of the tickets! Have you experienced something about Google Panda update with a similar site or with another e-commerce industry? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0