301 Re-Directs Puzzling Question on Page Returned in Search Results
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On our website, www.BusinessBroker.net, we have 3 different versions of essentially the same page for each of our State Business for Sale Pages. Back in August, we did a test and did 301 redirects using 5 States. For a long while after doing the redirects, the pages fell out of Google search results - we used to get page 1 rankings. Just recently they started popping back up on Page 1. However, I noticed that the new page meta data is not what is being picked up -- here is the example.
Keyword Searched for in Google -- "Maine Business for Sale"
Our listing shows up on Page 1 -- # 8 Result
URL returned is correct preferred version: - http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
However, the Page Title on this returned page is still the OLD page title -
OLD TITLE -- maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker
Not the title that is designated for this page -
New Title - Maine Businesses for Sale - Buy or Sell a Business in ME | BusinessBroker.net
Ditto for Meta Description.
Why is this happening?
Also have a problem with lower case showing up rather than upper case -- what's causing this?
http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
versus -- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks, MM
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thanks - we did some more research on our end and our developer found this --
The problem with the title, description and keywords is because we updated these for just Wyoming, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine and Florida. I made the mistake of assuming the URL would always have the proper case of the state in the URL but as we have discovered that was a bad assumption. The code was looking for those 5 states with the first letter capitalized and the link from Google was not so it defaulted to the format for the other states that we haven't changed yet. I have fixed that code so now those 5 states will display the correct title, description and keywords regardless of the case of the state in the URL. I will update the live site in the morning so this issue will be taken care of. We will still need to discuss the how best to handle the URLs that Google is getting with the incorrect case.
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I can't say for sure what happened last time since I am not exactly sure what you did. But as long as the 301 redirects are set up correctly and Google is not having any trouble accessing and crawling them, then you shouldn't experience any major negative results over the long term.
Now that I've read your initial post again, I see that the Maine page is one of the States you tried to redirect as part of your test. However, as I posted above, the old page is not being 301 redirected to the new page, so Google may have dropped your site in the rankings since you essentially had two very similar pages competing against each other for the same terms.
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The page that is ranking #8 in Google for me is http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx, and on that page, it has the old Title tag and it is not redirected to the version of the URL with the new Title tag.
When I visit http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx, I am seeing the new Title tag.
Since these are two completely different pages you will need to 301 redirect the URL with the old Title tag to the new one. That should solve your problems.
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follow up question regarding the upper and lower case question from our web developer ---
The question hasn't been how to do it. The question is what happens to all of the pages that are indexed by Google improperly when we do this? Are we going to see the same thing as when we redirected the states with a big drop for 6 months?
Keith
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Thanks for the response, appreciate it. I'm pretty confident we re-directed the non-preferred URLs to this preferred page --
http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
This page has the updated Title Tag, Meta Description, etc. however, is not the one that shows up in the Google Search Result for "Maine Business for Sale"
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I visited the page http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx and the Title tag in the HTML is "maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker" so perhaps you did not publish the new versions of the Title tags?
As for your lower case/upper case issue, I went to both URLs and they both resolve to an active page. I would suggest making the URLs consistent to minimize the risk of duplicate content. First, I would set the designated URL in the rel="canonical" tag for each page. And depending on the type of server, I would suggest forcing the URLs to 301 redirect to a single version of the URL. Here is a good blog post on how to address this specific issue - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/common-technical-seo-problems-and-how-to-solve-them
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