Should you ever reverse a 301
-
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
-
Please keep us updated
-
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,
-
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.
-
@ 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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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 Not Seeing My 301's
Good Morning! So I have recently been putting in a LOT of 301's into the .htaccess, no 301 plugins here, and GWMT is still seeing a lot of the pages as soft 404's. I mark them as fixed, but they come back. I will also note, the previous webmaster has ample code in our htaccess which is rewriting our URL structure. I don't know if that is actually having any effect on the issue but I thought I would add that. All fo the 301's are working, Google isn't seeing them. Thanks Guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Should You Use 301 Redirects When Switching To A Secure SSL Server?
Hi, our client has switched from a non-secure server to a secure (SSL) server.. but the non secure pages still exist, i.e. http://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (non-secure)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webpresence
https://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (secure) We assumed that we should 301 redirect the http pages to the new https pages using the following htaccess rule; RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L] HOWEVER! both of the above pages show the same Page Authority (PA) and Pagerank (PR).. does this mean that they are being seen as the same page, do we really need to employ 301 redirects? Many thanks in advance, much appreciated. 🙂 Lee1 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
Hi, This is a new one to me ?! I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages. Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on? The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s? I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet) Any help would be appreciated. Kind Regards Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thephoenix250 -
Confusing 301 / Canonical Redirect Issue - Wizard Needed
I had two pages on my site with identical content. What I did was 301 redirect one page to the other. I also added canonical redirect code to the page that held the 301 code. Here is what I have: www.careersinmusic.com/music-colleges.aspx - this page was a duplicate and I needed it to resolve to:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 4Buck
www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx Here is the code I used: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX music-colleges.aspx
<%@ Page Language="VB" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="music-colleges.aspx.vb" Inherits="music_colleges" %>
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> http://www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx"/> XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
music-colleges.aspx.vb
Partial Class music_colleges
Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader("Location", "http://www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx")
End Sub
End Class XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX The problem:
For some reason, when the search “music colleges” is done in Google, I am #7. When the term “music schools” is done, I am around 119. I MUST be getting a penalty for some reason, I just cannot figure the reason. When perform well for one term and terrible for the next? All I can come up with is a duplicate content penalty or something along those lines. Also, music-colleges.aspx seems to still be in Googles index, even though the above 301 happened months ago. Thoughts? site:www.careersinmusic.com/music-colleges.aspx Any insight into this would be GREATLY appreciated. Many Thanks!0 -
Why isnt my crawl results showing a 301 redirect even though I have a 301 rewrite in my .htaccess file?
Ive searched the previous Q&A's & cant find an answer so I;ll ask it here 🙂 crawling my site shows isnt the 301 redirect that i have from my non www to my www domainIts only showing all the results for my www subdomain.As i'm new to SEO & SeoMoz I dont fully understand. Any help would be greatly appreciated because my site is like 2 & a half years old & i'm trying to learn seo so I can rank higher in the serp's. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCTechGuy20120 -
Redirects 301
Hello guys, I have a doubt. If I reedirect a url with a pagerank of 2 to a new URL, will I loose the PR? My problem is that I have a long url in one page wich is not effective to target a keyword that Im persuing. Im climbing in Google, however I want to 1º place and I dont think that with this long URL I will make it. Advices? Cheers! Pedro M Pereira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0