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
-
Relaunching website in two phases - 301 redirect approach
Hey Mozzers, Interested to know your thoughts on the following situation. I am relaunching a website with an updated URL structure in TWO phases. Phase one will be a much smaller version of the site, with 30% of the pages going live - the remaining 70% of page won't be available until Phase two. In Phase one, these 30% of pages will be 301 redirected from their like-for-like versions - old site to new site. The remaining 70%... because the like-for-like pages won't be available until Phase two, which is likely to be launched in 3 months time, should I do a temporary redirect on these pages (302) to the new homepage for the time being, until the new versions of the pages are live - and then implement the 301 from old url to new url. A bit of a messy situation, and not ideal for SEO, but my hands are tied as the organisation is pushing ahead with this phased approach. So, interested to hear your thoughts on an appropriate 301 migration plan.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWesley0 -
Redesigning a website and losing the .html from pages! .301 needed?
I have redesigned a customers website, i kept all pages with the same name however they have gone from domain.com/pagename.html to domain.com/pagename (lost the .html) will these pages automatically be picked up as the same or do i need to do a 301 direct. If i need to do a redirect is there a faster way? As there's about 250 pages! Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvimateLtd0 -
Proper 301 in Place but Old Site Still Indexed In Google
So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today. The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Penalty after 301 redirect?
We run a training center. We had 1 main website and 2 dedicated websites to certain themes. The 2 dedicated websites are older and the main website is about 6 months old. The 2 dedicated websites had a top 5 ranking for their most important keywords. 2 weeks ago we imported all the content from the dedicated websites into the main website. Then immediately after we did a perfect 301 redirect of these websites to the main website. 2 SEO companies checked it for us and so I'm very sure this is done right. Google immediately caught this up and gave the main website a boost. We where in the top 10 for many important keywords for 1 week. The next week all our rankings dropped. We only have a top 50 ranking for 10 keywords. Before it was 75 keywords in the top 20. Do you know what could have caused this? Any suggestion, thought, ... is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Big 301 Redirect Help!
Hey guys I need a little help with setting up a big 301. Background: It's a bit of a mess as the old site is a total mess after being online for 10 years plus. It has html and php pages, and a mod rewrite to redirect old html links to the newer php version of those pages. It's now moving to a new site and as the domain name and URL structure has changed we can't use any fancy regex and have to do a page to page redirect. There are 1500 pages to redirect. However, the old site has thousands of linking root domains, and some of these are to the old html pages (which currently redirect to the php pages) and some to the newer php pages. Question: My initial plan was to leave the mod rewrite and only redirect the php pages. That means 1500 individual redirects instead of 3000 if I individually redirect both the php and html pages. I'm not sure what's best to be honest. We don't really want multiple hops in the redirect (html>php>new site), but surely 1500 redirects is better than 3000! Does anyone have any advice on which option may be best, or even a better option? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarveyP0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Canonical or 301 redirect, that is the question?
So my site has duplicate content issues because of the index.html and the www and non www version of the site. What's the best way to deal with this without htaccess? Is it a 301 redirect or is it the canonical, or is it both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Reverse Proxys - Lost On It's Purpose To Help Seo
Reverse Proxys - Lost On It's Purpose To Help Seo - read an article on seomoz check link below. When should we use this reverse proxy and is it really worth the trouble at all ? Why create subdomains vs subfolders when organizing different sections of the website ? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | helpwanted0