301 Re-Directs Puzzling Question on Page Returned in Search Results
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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"
-
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
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
-
Search function rendering cached pages incorrectly
On a category page the products are listed via/in connection with the search function on the site. Page source and front-end match as they should. However when viewing a browser rendered version of a google cached page the URL for the product has changed from, as an example - https://www.example.com/products/some-product to https://www.example.com/search/products/some-product The source is a relative URL in the correct format, so therefore /search/ is added at browser rendering. The developer insists that this is ok as the query string in the Google cache page result URL is triggering the behaviour, confusing the search function - all locally. I can see this but just wanted feedback that internally Google will only ever see the true source or will it's internal rendering mechanism possibly trigger similar behaviour?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards1 -
Search queries results Wrong
Hey there, My website shows Wrong Search Queries in Google Search Console, Also Shows URLS which are not there in my website, Which Shows in crawl Errors. here i have attached Screenshot . http://prntscr.com/egzl88 Please Help me out how i can Deindex This type of URLs From Google index, & make My main pages crawl First in Google Search. because of this my website Ranking Also lost, Please any Expert can help out.. Thanx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pooja.verify030 -
Getting too many links on Google search results, how do I fix?
I'm a total newbie so I apologize for what I am sure is a dumb question — I recently followed Moz suggestions for increasing visibility on my site for a specific keyword by including that keyword in more verbose page descriptions for multiple pages. This worked TOO well as now that keyword is bringing up too many results in Google for these different pages on my site . . . is there a way to compile them into one result with the subpages like for instance, the attached image for a search on Apple? Do I need to change something in my robots.txt file to direct these to my main page? Basically, I am a photographer and a search for my name now brings up each of my different photo gallery pages in multiple results, it's a little over the top. Thanks for any and all help! CNPJZgb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jason54540 -
How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ? For eg 1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rajeevEDU0 -
To index or de-index internal search results pages?
Hi there. My client uses a CMS/E-Commerce platform that is automatically set up to index every single internal search results page on search engines. This was supposedly built as an "SEO Friendly" feature in the sense that it creates hundreds of new indexed pages to send to search engines that reflect various terminology used by existing visitors of the site. In many cases, these pages have proven to outperform our optimized static pages, but there are multiple issues with them: The CMS does not allow us to add any static content to these pages, including titles, headers, metas, or copy on the page The query typed in by the site visitor always becomes part of the Title tag / Meta description on Google. If the customer's internal search query contains any less than ideal terminology that we wouldn't want other users to see, their phrasing is out there for the whole world to see, causing lots and lots of ugly terminology floating around on Google that we can't affect. I am scared to do a blanket de-indexation of all /search/ results pages because we would lose the majority of our rankings and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the ranks of our optimized static pages. The ideal is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages - but for some reason Google keeps choosing the internal search results page as the "better" page to rank for our targeted keywords. Can anyone advise? Has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
How to have pages re-indexed
Hi, my hosting company has blocked one my web site seeing it has performance problem. Result of that, it is now reactivated but my pages had to be reindexed. I have added my web site to Google Webmaster tool and I have submitted my site map. After few days it is saying: 103 number of URLs provided 39 URLs indexed I know Google doesn't promesse to index every page but do you know any way to increase my chance to get all my pages indexed? By the way, that site include pages and post (blog). Thanks for your help ! Nancy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
301 redirects from old to new pages whit a lot of changes
Hello all, We are going to restyle and change CMS so all the urls will change. We are also updating content, adding much more content to the old pages trying to be more user and SEO friendly. My doubt is about doing 301 redirects from old to new pages when the content has changed a lot. Does it will mantain the ranking of the page or will crawlers thought that is a total diferent page. For example: one page new page will change from the old one the url, title, headers, meta description, content text and images. Should i maintain old content and do the CMS change with the 301 redirects and later change the content, that means a lot of work, or do it all at once? Thanks in advance Tomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomas.guemes0 -
Can you pass social signals with a 301 re-direct?
Does a 301 re-direct pass social signals such as 'likes' 'tweets' and '+1s"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0