Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
-
Hi,
We seem to have a slightly odd issue.
We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc.
One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc.
On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc.
Thanks.
-
Can anyone offer any insight on this? The issue shows no sign of improving, and our organic is tanking.
If this really is an issue on Google's side, and it appears based on our technical set up, how can I force Google to take note and reindex the pages?
Here are some more examples, from across a number of categories..
Category A:
Page that has dropped out of index: https://goo.gl/KEQ8Yh
Cached version of that page: https://goo.gl/DPzFWMPage that has dropped out of index: https://goo.gl/5KiQ4s Cached version of that page: https://goo.gl/myRWNg Category B: Page that has dropped out of index: https://goo.gl/pr3YQs
Cached version of that page: https://goo.gl/8SEYi5 Page that has dropped out of index: https://goo.gl/LqzDrg
Cached version of that page: https://goo.gl/iwPs45 Category
Page that has dropped out of index: https://goo.gl/YBZS7c Cached version of that page:https://goo.gl/n33QzG Page that has dropped out of index: https://goo.gl/Ht4gfO
Cached version of that page: https://goo.gl/u81vbA -
Weirdly, at the time this seemed to correct itself overnight without any fixes our end. However 6 months on and it has happened again... Only this time, all location pages have dropped out of index, but latest cache versions all redirect to the Kansas page.
Have checked log files for these relevant URLs, and all show 200 (and being crawled regularly). When you fetch them in SC the show as complete, and they are all still indexed in Bing.
Very confused!
-
Hi Nicola,
Have you checked your canonical tags to be sure that they are pointing to the correct URL? Sometimes with storefront pages people just copy/paste the same HTML, swapping out the contact information. But maybe they forgot to update the canonical tags?
Keep us updated!
-
Thanks for advice Chris. Have checked, and can't see any issues with htaccess or robots seem. A very strange one indeed!
-
Hi Anthony,
Desktop returns 200, whilst mobile returns a 302 to the mDOT site.
Thanks.
-
Hi Nicola,
Sounds like a very strange one indeed. I can't say I've ever heard of Google giving a redirect when other 3rd party crawlers give you a 200.
My only suggestion to begin the troubleshooting would be to have a look at your htaccess and maybe Robots to see if there are any directives in there addressing Google specifically.
Anthony's suggestion is also a great idea. At least you'll see what Google is picking up on those pages right now rather what they saw last time it was cached.
-
You mention these pages are returning 200 in SEO tools, but would you please share what are these URLs are returning when you Fetch as Googlebot in Google Search Console? Test it in both desktop and mobile versions.
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
-
Is an iframe redirect on the same Domain bad for SEO
Good morning. We have a vendor that has created a landing page with content that we want to use. Because of the way we built the site, the only way to use the content is to create an i-frame. The i-frame is re-directingon the same Domain. Would we benefit from the SEO Content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jdenbo_edf0 -
Domain Redirect and SSL Cert
Hi, When redirecting an entire site to another domain, do you have to maintain the SSL certificate? The SSL expires 3 days before the planned redirect. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sofla_seo0 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0 -
Cookies and redirects - what are the negative effects?
I am advising a client who wants to streamline their online customers experience through the use of cookies. The first time someone visits mysite.com, they will visit the normal index page, and on that page will be asked to identify themselves as a Personal or Business customer - and taken through to a relevant page. This will result in a cookie being added. The next time they come back to mysite.com, the cookie will automatically direct them from the index page to mysite.com/personal/ or mysite.com/business/. My question is, what are the SEO implications of this, especially given the fact the index page is their primary landing page for almost all organic traffic? Bots I realise that googlebot etc do not store cookies, so this should result in no change from the bots perspective (i.e. no redirect) but is it that simple? In effect we'll be showing the bot one thing and second time + visitors something else. Is this not effectively cloaking? All advice gratefully received!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomasters0