301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?
-
Hi,
When pushing our new site live, most of the 301 redirections got done too late for several reasons. Understandably, our site rankings in google have taken a hit now.
So far we have just tried to perfectly optimize the pages that used to rank well (They weren't even optimized before and were still ranking) , to get our positions back.
But does anyone have an idea about what else we could do? Is there a recommended "action plan" when someone is late with their 301 redirections?
-
Hi, Tom!
Thanks for the quick response - Yes we have implemented the 301 regardless, so I hope we will see our rankings improve again They actually already have, I checked GA and organic traffic has gone up 100% in the last week, when compared to the previous week. So something must be happening
Thank You,
Johan
-
Hi Johan,
As Tom says definately make sure your 301s are in place. Especially for a large site you will want to submit a new sitemap to help indexing the new urls and a user friendly 404 page perhaps noting the redesign and linking to the main areas of the new site would be a good idea if you expect to still be getting traffic to old urls that are not covered by 301s for some reason. The basics in other words, but worth a mention.
-
Hi Johan
Have you implemented the 301s regardless? It may take time, but there should be no reason for the link equity to inevtiably pass to the new URLs and for Google to give the new URLs the same credit, and possibly ranking, as before.
If the redirections are in place and rankings don't recover in, say, a month, then the course of action would be to optimise the new URLs as you would have done previously - making sure the on-page is all in order and then earning high quality links.
There's no magic solution to implementing 301s at a later stage and it works on the same SEO principles as before, but so long as the 301s are now in place then Google should (emphasis on should) eventually give your new URLs the strength the previous URLs had and hopefully promote it in the rankings.
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
-
Redirecting traffic to https
Hey! i was wondering, should i force all traffic to https address? i know that overall a better secured website will rank better since it earns more trust from users which means less bounce rate and the list of benefits is endless..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
but should i FORCE ALL traffic to a https? or maybe only force a http to https? or not at all?2 -
Tough 301 redirect with a /www in it
Hi Mozzers, I'm using Eggplants 301 redirect via wordpress and for some reason I can't redirect one url. The example of it is below: www.website.com/news/www.website.com As you can see, it looks like there's 2 url's and this plugin doesn't do the trick. Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe via .htaccess? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Moving to a new domain name - 301 redirect NOT an option
Hi everyone My question concerns moving from an old to a new domain name without losing all previous SEO efforts. I am aware that a properly executed 301 redirect is the answer and way to go as well as telling Google about it in Webmaster Tools. However, what is the situation, if you do not own the old domain name anymore? If you have no means of getting back the old domain name and wanting to basically mask/switch the already existing website to the new domain name, will search engines penalise the "new site" as a duplicate, since the "old site" is still in the search engine rankings? I know that not being able to execute a proper 301 redirect and starting out with a new domain means a fresh start, but what is the best way to minimise the negative impact (if any)? Basically dropping the sites' current content and starting out new in favour of the new domain name is not really an option. Even if you were to take the content from the old site and place it on another site, this would surely be seen as duplicate too. Anyone thinks that Webmaster Tools/Google is savvy enough to spot the difference when the "old site" gets removed and the "new one" added instead (in Webmaster Tools). I read something along the lines about having your host point the DNS from the old site to the new one. Could something like be helpful? Thanks all in advance for your help and input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0 -
Duplicate content reported on WMT for 301 redirected content
We had to 301 redirect a large number of URL's. Not Google WMT is telling me that we are having tons of duplicate page titles. When I looked into the specific URL's I realized that Google is listing an old URL's and the 301 redirected new URL as the source of the duplicate content. I confirmed the 301 redirect by using a server header tool to check the correct implementation of the 301 redirect from the old to the new URL. Question: Why is Google Webmaster Tool reporting duplicated content for these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAccount320 -
What if a 301 redirect is removed?
Suppose the following scenarios after a 301 redirects from source URL to targent URL is removed. 1. If source URL raises a 404 error, will target URL retained the link juice previously passed from source URL? 2. If source URL starts to show different content than what is showing on target URL, will the previously passed link juice be credited back to the source URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
"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 -
301 redirects and Blogger - moving blog
Is there any way to add 301 redirects to individual posts on a blogger-hosted blog? We're getting ready to finally move our blog off of Blogger and onto our own webserver. We're probably going to use BlogEngine.net to run it. right now the blog is located at blog.MySite.com. We're probably going to move it to MySite.com/Blog. We don't have any really popular posts and we only really get ~10 visits a day on about 70 posts. Just trying to figure out the best way to handle this without inadvertently shooting myself in the foot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _JP_0 -
Is it ok to redirect
Hello my question is presently we holding one .com for our website and i see in analytics some time people typing .es version of our site too.. which is not registered yet. is it ok to buy that .es extension and do a redirect to our .com version ? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idreams0