Should you ever reverse a 301

[kellymandingo]

Hi

Im Looking at reversing a 301 i did 5 months ago, I originally changed names of a site for reasons where the site was going to be split into 2 where part of the site i would run and the other where i would get my business partner to run it

However since the 301 i have lost 80% of traffic and cannot find the reason as to what especially as everything looks perfect except the rankings, to put it into context 150 keywords i was tracking all were page 5 and below with 40% being page 1

Now only 7 from that same 150 are in the top 10 pages (First 100 results), The issue i have must be very rare as i have posted for help with little or no response, which tells me that the kind people who have looked could not see any issues as this is normally a very helpful community (below is the last thread i asked for help)

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-how-to-get-those-juices-flowing

So 5 months on i am considering removing the 301 and hoping that some kind of normality returns by reinstating the old URL

So my question is that is what im about to do wise, do i have any options, is this something you have done in the past if so how did you get on

Thanks in advance

[Vizergy]

Please keep us updated

[kellymandingo]

I am really tempted to revert back, but i have had some extremely busy bot activity since i turned on those internal URLs for a few days as posted by

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

Although this image says humans they seem to be bots, the blue is current and the red line is last month so something is going on but not sure yet

Ill await another week then make a decision

Many thanks for taking the time to respond,

current-visitors.jpg

[Vizergy]

Yeah and I guess if it was a penalty you would have received an email - Google is being all transparent now.  This is an odd situation you have.  maybe you should kill the 301 just to see if the old site shoots back up.  Weird, my friend... very weird.  I wish I could be of any assistance but I have never seen this before.  Good luck.

[kellymandingo]

@ Billy

Thank you for responding

The link profile is not good in fact i have not linked to this new site that much as i wanted to see where i was before i embarked on a strategic plan of action, because i did not get much time i employed a third party to start a facebook and social media for me opposed to the linking however they thought they were doing me a favour by added random links.

I have many more than what you can see but most i have removed, i reported those to Google and showed them what i have done and they confirmed there was no manual penalty holding me back (no manual actions)

but i thought the 301 should push most of the link juice over from the old and that has not happened

I may just have to face facts that the 301 is not going to pass the juice over

but what my real question is why and where is the PR from the home page, there has to be an issue because the PR has gone to many inner pages but not the home

I thought like you did that im caught up in an algorithmic penalty but that wont pull PR from the home page and let inner pages have their page rank

[Vizergy]

Is it possible that the 301s actually don't have much to do with it?  Or perhaps that doing this drew algorithmic attention to the website?  In going over your website I, like others before me, couldn't find any reason for you to get knocked back so then I ran your site (the new one) through open site explorer and it seems the majority of your links are blog comments and most of those are on blogs that are in genres unrelated to what you do.  It could just be that Google isn't giving you the credit for these links that they used to.  Just a thought.

[kellymandingo]

Thanks

Done pretty much everything i can think of.

the content is identical to the old site as i just changed names  everything else including site structure is identical, the old site is totally removed from the Index (which only finished around 3 weeks ago (17k page site)

Had many of links changed over .. PR has updated  many of the inner pages but the home page is still a PR1, down From a 4 and if you copy text from any of the pages it wont show in Google search

This to me says i have an issue, but what that issue is i do not know, i had a problem a few years back where i missed the Http:// from an internal link and somehow Google had interpreted that as a 301, i fixed that and PR and rankings returned within 48 hours. this seems awfully similar and checking for this throws up nothing.

Also open site explorer still has the old site at a PA of 60 my new url at 42 with hardly any of the links moving over, so its just not Google slow or cannot read the 301 correctly

Header responses are what they should be so little lost on this one

Ill give it to the next  Link update which is the 11th and if not much else changed then ill remove the 301, but i was hoping there was something stopping me from ranking opposed to just bad luck

[Fatwallet]

Have you done any similar link building to the new url?
Is the new url 100% clean? Is the content and intent the same or very similar?

I've had similar experience where the 301 seemed to drop rank and make things worse, especially when the content doesn't match exactly. I've removed/reversed with good results, and I've also let a few incubate longer (with more link building) with good results.

If you've made an effort to build similar links, and even get some of the old links changed to point the new url and the ranking still doesn't come back - i'd remove the 301 and see what happens.