301 redirect hell.... How do you de-commission an old site
-
Hi SEO experts:
We operate a vacation rental website and around 1 year ago moved to a different platform. Because our pages are arranged by location (what we refer to as Locales) we need to put 301 redirects for all the old locale pages. So for example:
www.example.com/__Skeggness.cfm redirects to www.example/com/vacation-rentals/locale/skeggness
But here's the problem: We can't seem to get Google to drop those old __{locale_name}.cfm pages... even after over 12-months of the new site going live!
Other clues we've noticed:
-
The old underscore URLs show up in our SERP sub-links
-
Sometimes google shows the new page title and description but attributes it to the __{locale_name}.cfm URL (aghh!!!)
One suggestion we received was to use the URL removal tool in Google WMT.... But given we have 1,000's of locales i don't see that as being affective.
Questions:
-
Any suggestions on how to get Google to drop these old URLs and use the new ones?
-
Is this situation hurting our SEO? Or do you think its benign... and I should just take a deep breath.... and relax at little more...
-
-
Hi AABAB,
This is pretty common. Unfortuneatly, Google can keep your old URLs around for a long time, especially pages without much authority.
And yes, this can have a negative impact on your SEO - especially if Google in situations where Google is indexing both the old and new URLs, and hasn't processed the 301.
Muhammed has a good suggestion. Create or put up a sitemap of your old URLs, and submit this sitemap to Google via Webmaster Tools. The idea is that Google will re-crawl these URLs, finally register the 301, and drop those pages from the index.
The URL removal tool would be a great option if all the pages are in the same directory, such as /old-pages/xxxxx, as Google allows you to remove entire directories in bulk. But unfortunately it looks like your URLs are all at the root, so this isn't an option.
Regardless, hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I hope you can do the same for this situation also.
All we needed to to do is make Google to visit your OLD URLs for a last time and let it know that its 301'd to another URL.
So keep all your OLD URLs in HTML sitemap (not XML) until Google cache it again.
Also check when is the last date Google cached your OLD URLs
-
Thanks Muhammed:
A little bit of a different situation i think as you're referring to moving from one domain to another domain right? In our situation we're keeping domain - but all the URLs are changed from one site structure to another.
Also, nothing of the old site remains. We can't really run the two platforms side-by-side under the same domain.
-
Hi
I had this same issue with one of my website before.
Steps I done
-
Created 301 from all the other pages except the home page
-
Created a temporary Home page/ Landing page for telling human visitors that my old domain is moved to newdomain.com.
3) Created a HTML Sitemap in OLD domain for all the current indexed OLD URLs (everything is already redirected to newdomain.com) and placed it in olddomain.com/sitemap.html
At this time the only available 202 pages in my OLD site is the 1) Home page & 2) The HTML sitemap page
-
Created/Edit the current XML sitemap (OLD Site). Included only the above two pages/links in the XML sitemap. Updated the XML sitemap from Web Master Tools.
-
Waited 1-2 months. All my URLs got removed from SERP
-
At this stage I created 301 redirect to the remaining Home & Sitemap Page
Done!
I'm not sure this is a best practice or not, But it worked for me. Consider others feedback before doing this
-
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
-
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
301 redirect recommendations
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4. We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5 Is it best to do: www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page or www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated.. The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind. can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
301 Redirect and Webmaster Central
I've been working on removing canonical issues. My host is Apache. Is this the correct code for my htaccess? RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] SECOND!!! I have two websites under Google's Webmaster Central; http://luckygemstones.com which gets NO 404 soft errors... AND http://www.luckygemstones.com which has 247 soft 404 errors... I think I should DELETE the http://luckygemstones.com site from Webmaster Central--the 301 redirect handles the"www" thing. Is this correct? I hate to hose things (even worse?) Help! Kathleen0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
How important is having a 301 redirect?
Is having a 301 redirect a must for rankings when it comes to the www and non-www version of a site? I am on the bottom of page 1 for my main key phrases but I can't do a 301 redirect with my web host that I've been with for over a year. I've been considering changing web host (currently with Yahoo) but I also have concerns about transferring the site and the impact it might have because of the changing ip address. So my options are Stay Put Change Web host Which would you recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
301 redirect Actinic HTML pages to ASP. Achievable?
Hi - I'm hoping someone can help me resolve an issue in relation to setting up 301 redirects. The client to whom I provide SEO services is being told by his developers that setting up 301 redirects is not achievable from old HTML pages to his new site running on a Windows server. My feeling is that it should be fine, and I have found documentation online that seems to support this, however I'm no developer, certainly no server admin, so I was wondering if anyone could advise me? Is it feasible to set up 301 redirects from Actinic sites (HTML pages) to a new site in NOP commerce running on a Windows server (ASP pages). Thank you for your help! Iain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wynyard0 -
How long for a 301 redirect to pass PR?
Hi, How long does it take for a 301 redirect to pass PR/Juice to the new domain it's redirecting to? From what I understand you tell Google in Webmaster tools this domain is now going to this domain and then setup a file on the old domains hosting to redirect to the new. And that's it! If that is correct how long does it take? 2 days, 2 weeks, months, maybe never??? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0