Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected
-
Hey there,
In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore.
But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again.
The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version.
Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?
-
I've seen that happen before Martin. Is it possible the old (.nl) version of the site is still sitting on a server somewhere and getting accessed (and indexed) by Google?
-
That's pretty odd. Only thing I can think of is Google received more signals to rank the .nl site (maybe some new backlinks were found/created?) Overall, sounds like a bug that should be reversed.. how long have the ranking reverted for?
Note, that you can still rank for some Dutch keywords if you received backlinks with dutch anchor text.
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 Review Nodes
I have a client who rents out vacation beach rentals. They currently have thousands of homes under management. Each property has its own internal reviewing platform. Reviews are not really intended to be viewed on their own, as in a stand alone page with just the review on it. The problem is that Drupal makes just about every type of node viewable on its own dedicated URL. I was just thinking about taking request to view stand alone reviews and 301’ing them to their respective property page, the context in which they are intended to be viewed. The website has about 2500 review nodes currently crawlable via Drupal that sit on their own URLs. Would there be a material impact to 301 them to their respective property page when any attempt to view them on their own is made to the site?
Technical SEO | | conversionpipeline20 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
301 redirects don't work properly
Hello all, I've been working on 301 redirects for a bit and normally it's no problem but some seem to be going wrong. Redirect 301 /3-zits.html http://www.bankstellenshop.com/banken/3-zits.html This one works properly but the following one gives a very strange result as it goes to http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen.html/u (no idea where the .html comes from) Redirect 301 /bankstellen/u http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen/u.html Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what should change? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Kapottefietsband0 -
Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name. The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible. Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | sitestrux0 -
Duplicat content affecting SEO Rankings
We have one main site called buypropertyanywhere, it is a database it holds all the data for all our property websites. One of our most popular sites is housesalesbulgaria, which takes the data from buypropertyanywhere in regards to bulgarian property and display it. The same with housesalesturkey it takes the data in regards to turkish property and display it. We think because buypropertyanywhere and housesalesbulgaria has the same data it has high duplicate content . We think this is affecting the SEO rankings for housesalesbulgaria. Google is looking at housesalesbulgaria as if a copy of buypropertyanywhere. So therefore should we SEO buypropertyanywhere soley and link it to housesalesbulgaria through the articles and content we put on the site. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Feily0 -
301 Redirect Properly To Keep the Juice
I have a bunch of WP Blogs and was thinking of taking all linkjuice from these to my main money site. The most of the other WP Blogs is hosted at godaddy.com (domain and site) and I know they have a URL Redirects page in site manager but I`m not sure this is the right way to go. Also I wonder some of these sites have hundreds of blogposts there is no way I can "re-create" those on the money site but I am sure that is not a must-thing to do in order to keep the "juice" right or wrong? Last but not least, I was wondering if you think it would be best to redirect the sites to relevant pages on money sites. For instance if i had a domain called cheap-ties.com with 100 blogposts about this and on money site a webshop with a category called ties, should redirect to this or to main domain or doesnt it matter?
Technical SEO | | fAgBxa8b0 -
Not sure which URL to use for 301 redirect
A client has new website design completed by another developer, was launched in April of this year. No 301 redirect was set up so duplicate content is an issue. Client has had a website with same domain name for about 10 years, but has not had any SEO work completed before or since his new site design. For non-www there are 6 referring links - 1 considered to have authority, for www there are also 6 but 3 considered to have authority. More links seem to coming from www than non-www. But for one of the clients keywords they are ranked #1 for their area and that links to their non-www address. And even though no redirects set up by developer, non-www has had far more visits according to Google Analytics. So many basics that still need to be done for site: no meta-descriptions on any page, H1 and page titles could use keywords, call to action moved above fold, etc. Considering this is a new site, and new SEO work and many more inbound links needed, does it matter which address I redirect to? _Cindy Barnard
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
How many jumps between 301 redirects is acceptable?
For example, I have a page A that should be redirected to page D, but instead A redirects to B, B redirects to C and C redirects to D. It's something I came across and wondering if its worth the dev time to change it. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | pbrothers240