Wrong redirect used
-
Hi Folks,
I have a query & looking for some opinions.Our site migrated to https://
Somewhere along the line between the developer & hosting provided 302 redirect was implemented instead of the recommended 301 (the 301 rule was not being honured in the htaccess file.)
1 week passed, I noticed some of our key phrases disappear from the serps When investigated, I noticed this the incorrect redirect was implemented.The correct 301 redirect has now been implemented & functioning correctly.
- I have created a new https property in webmaster tools,
- Submitted the sitemap,
- Provided link in the robots.txt file to the https sitemap
- Canonical tags set to correct https.
My gut feeling is that Google will take some time to realise the problem & take some time to update the search results we lost.
Has anyone experienced this before or have any further thoughts on how to rectify asap.
-
Hi Vettyy & Michael,
Thanks a million for your response.
Implemented both your suggestions, Screaming frog showed the previous 302 are now 301 so everything seems ok on that end. I have also updated Google My Places listing to reflectUsing site:mydomain.com has showed a mixture of https vs http so I am guessing I just need to wait & monitor - cross my fingers & hope for the best.
-
It sounds like you have done all the right things. I agree with Vettyy that you should use something like Screaming Frog to crawl all the old URLs just to double check there are no hanging 404 pages or missed http pages. Switching to 301 will take a few days to filter through, so you could run cache:domain.com in Google on your most important pages to monitor when they are being crawled. Also do you have a mix of http and https in Google in present? It may very well be something to just wait and monitor.
A good tool for sniffing URLs headers is Fiddler.
-
I normally do a fetch and render in Google Search Console (webmaster tools) and submit to index. It gives you the option of submitting an individual page but I normally fetch and render the main domain and then select 'crawl this url and its direct links'. Then if there are only a couple of important pages not being indexed or recognized by Google, fetch and render and submit those individual ones.
type in site:www.yourdomain.com" in Google to monitor manually which pages are indexed as well.
If you have the time I would pop a list of your original urls in screaming frog to see which page their redirecting to, or test a couple of pages using this http://www.wheregoes.com/retracer.php to see how many redirects are in place.
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
-
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Redirecting from _ to - ?
hi everyone, I need your help! 🙂 What's the best way to redirect a lot of urls from sign _ to sign - ? We changed our e-shop CMS and we don't use that _ anymore. We have more than 100.000 URLs and you can imagine that we don't to do by hand. Any chance of doing it with .htaccess easily? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
To Redirect or Not
I have a strange situation and looking for advice on how well a permanent redirect of url will work. I have an eCommerce site called twpstain.com. This site sells TWP Deck stain and the URL/Content is fully owned by me. We do not however own the TWP brand and have always operated with permission from the manufacturer as an Authorized dealer. Circumstance have come up where they now want to be in control of all URLS that have the name "TWP" in them. Not sure if they legally can do this but they can cut me off with product if I do not comply. My options are: 1. A permanent redirect of entire site to new URL that does not have the word "TWP" in the url. 2. Give them the URL but they are willing to have me use the URL as I have in the past. A contract for this would be drawn up to cover me for years to come and possibly offer compensation if they decide not to renew. My concerns are numerous but the question for the Moz community is to how well the 301 redirect will work and will I lose my rankings? I currently dominate the rankings for my site and I very concerned that there will be major loss of sales and traffic. Any help or opinions on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dogtopiamichigan0 -
How to redirect an url in .htaccess when "redirect 301" doesnt work
I have an odd page url, generated by a link from an external website, it has: %5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb ,after a .jpg image url, and I can't get it redirect using the redirect 301 in .htaccess to the properly image url as I use to do with the rest of not found urls eg: /15985.jpg%5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb to just: /15985.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Status0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
DNS Settings went wrong....
Hi, I'm going to have to give you a little bit of a back story here... In July last year we launched a brand new website, www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk. It was on a new domain. The IT department set it live, and unfortunately messed up the DNS settings so that the site was launched under the wrong domain, smartloan.co.uk. This error was rectified within hours. Unfortunately in those few hours, Google indexed it! I then had to set up webmaster tools for both domains, so I could use the 'remove URLs' tool in there, to remove all the URLs from the smartloan domain. That all worked fine, the Landlords site was probably set back a bit, but we're now achieving some quite good results for it. 2 weeks ago we launched Smartloan as a product, and of course launched the website we've been working on for months... You guessed it! Google is now looking for all those old Landlords pages under Smartloan. My first thought is that we should do 301s. Would that be the best course of action, do you think? Webmaster tools has found 25 of them so far, but I know there are more - the Landlords site launched with about 90 pages... And where should I send the 301's? To the Landlords site, or to the smartloan root? Is there anything else I should do? Thanks for your help! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
redirect 404 pages to homepage
Hello, I'm puting a new website on a existing domain. In order to not loose the links that point to the varios old url I would like to redirect them to homepage. The old website was a mess as there was no seo and the pages didn't target any keywords. Thats why I would like to redirect all links to home. What do you think is the best way to do this ? I tried to ad this in the .htaccess but it's not working; ErrorDocument 404 /index.php Con you tell me how it exacly look? Now the hole file is like this: @package Joomla @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2012 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems with some server configurations. It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in your .htaccess file. If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's. If they work, it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below This attempts to block the most common type of exploit attempts to Joomla! Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]([^)]) [OR] Block out any script that includes a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | igrizo0 -
Best way to geo redirect
Hi I have a couple of ecommerce websites which have both a UK and USA store. At the moment I have both the UK and the USA domains sending me traffic from UK and USA search engines which means that a number of users are clicking a Google page for the store not in their location, ie UK people are clicking on a .com listing and ending up on the USA website. What is the best way to automatically redirect people to the correct store for their region? If I use an IP based auto redirect system would Google see some of the pages are doorway pages? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0