Upper to Lower Case and Endless Redirects
-
I have a site that first got indexed about a year ago for several months. I shut it down and opened it up again about 5 months ago. 2 months ago I discovered that the upper case in the pages: www.site.com/some-detail/Bizname/product was a no-no. There are no backlinks to these pages yet, so for search engines I put in 301 redirects to the lower case version thinking after a few weeks Bing and Google would figure it out and no longer try to crawl them. FYI there are thousands of these pages, and they are dynamically created.
Well, 2 months later google is still crawling the upper case urls even though it appears that only the lower case are in the index (from when I do a site:www.site.com/some-detail ) search.
Bing is also crawling the upper case although I'm not seeing any of the upper case pages and only a small percentage of the lower case ones show using a site:www.site.com/details.... command
Assuming there are no backlinks will they eventually stop crawling those uppercase pages? If not, again assuming there are no backlinks, should I 410 the upper case pages, or will that remove any credit I am getting for the page having existed for over a year prior to changing the upper to lower?
-
I'd give the sitemap a submission as soon as you get the URLs cleaned up. That should really help. Cheers!
-
Hi Ryan,
The sitemap has yet to be submitted as I've been cleaning up url issues first. However, Google has crawled 15,000 pages anyway, and Bing several thousand. Everything is lowercase on the site now, and there are only 9 backlinks (all no-follow) from just 2 domains, as I haven't yet started building them. I'll wait a couple more months and see if the number gets closer to zero,.
Thanks. Ted -
Which ones are in your sitemap, uppercase or lowercase? Have you double checked any and all internal links on your site to make sure everything is lowercase? Are there other sites out there pointing to uppercase? Are you 100% certain of a complete purge?
If you are, then they should eventually stop crawling the uppercase. Still, having them crawl the upper case and receive a 301 redirect doesn't involve much bandwidth.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
Hi, I've just migrated our previous site (siteA) to our new url (siteB) and I've setup 301 redirects from the old url (siteA) to the new (siteB). However, the old url operated on https and users who try to go to the old url with https (https://siteA.com) receive a message that the server cannot be reached, while the users who go to http://siteA.com are redirected to siteB. Is there a way to 301 redirect https traffic? Also, from an SEO perspective if the site and all the references on Google search are https://siteA.com does a 301 redirect of http pass the domain authority, etc. or is https required? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | opstart0 -
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Undo a 301 redirect
Hi there, 4 months ago I have done a redirect from one domain to another. Now, after about 120 days I have just a few results from the old domain indexed. The problem is that I believe that the old domain name had a really big impact on rankings, as it had the main keyword in the domain name. I'm wondering now if I could restore the old domain just by taking out the 301 instruction and how will search engines react. Do you have any studies on that? Would it be possible? Matt Cutts himself did it with his own domain, but he doesn't talk specifically on the effect of the rankings: http://www.thedotcomblog.com/seo/redirects-after-change-in-domain-name Thanks in advance for any help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandraMoZ0 -
Redirect a temporary IP
I was performing some development work on a client's site recently under a temporary location on the host's server, for example: http://11.22.33.444/~accountname/folder/page.html Google managed to index a couple of pages using this url 😞 I have updated DNS to the correct domain and the site is live, but I am a bit confused in regards to the correct way to create a 301 Redirect for this example or at least a way point it to our 404 page. I am hoping someone more proficient with htaccess can help me out a bit... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
301 Redirect With A Message And Delay
Hello, I'd like to sell a site I own. I'd like the site to be redirected to the buyers site with a 301 redirect. But I'd like the viewer to be informed that the site was purchased by this company and they will be redirect in 5 seconds.I'd like for the redirect to be a complete 301 and pass as much linklove as possible. Are you familiar with how to do this? Thanks, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
301 Redirect To Corresponding Link No Matter The URL?
Hey guys I have hosting on Host Gator with I believe an apache web server. I need a code to put in the HT ACCESS to redirect all WWW URL's to their corresponding http URL. I haven't been able to get a code to work. For example, http://www.mysite.org/page1.html -> http://mysite.org/page1.html , without having to redirect hundreds of pages individually Here is the format my server uses in the HT ACCESS file for 301 redirects. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.org$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.org
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinX
$RewriteRule ^Electric-Pressure-Cookers.html$ "http://mysite.org/Pressure-Cookers.html" [R=301,L] Thanks0