Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
-
I'll keep this one short and sweet
Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL.
The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results.
This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages.
I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index.
Many thanks
-
Many thanks for your response. The 301's were implemented around April 2012 - There were a couple of URL's which were missed however and this would probably explain the cached versions that you've picked up on.
I've just checked two dozen URL's at random and have only picked up on three pages that are cached and these are the first three results on the first page. The remaining pages don't seem to have cached versions available which would insinuate that Google hasn't been able to crawl them for some time.
I've just set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore the dispmode variable so thanks for the heads up on this feature which I've completely glazed over in the past. On the assumption that the 301's were set up correctly would you imagine that configuring WMT do disallow crawling of these pages would speed up the removal process?
-
How long ago did you implement the 301 redirects? I just checked the Google cache of one of the dispmode URLs and the page was cached on December 24th, 2012 for the URL. If the 301s were put in place prior to December 24th, then Google should have followed the 301 redirect instead of caching that version of the page.
My suggestion would be to configure the parameters with Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google not to index the URLs with the dispmode parameter.
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 impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
URL Structure Change - 301 Redirect - on large website
Hi Guys, I have a website which has approximately 15 million pages indexed. We are planning to change url structure of 99.99% of pages but it would remain on same domain. eg: older url: xyz.com/nike-shoes; new url: xyx.com/shopping/nike-shoes A benefit that we would get is adding a related and important keyword in url. We also achieve other technical benefits in identifying the page type before hand and can reduce time taken to serve the pages (as per our tech team). For older URLs, we are planning to do a 301 redirect. While this seems to be the correct thing to do as per Google, we do see that there is a very large number of cases where people have suffered significantly on doing something like this : Here are our questions: Will all page rank value will be passed to new url? (i.e. will there be a 100% passing of PR/link juice to the new URLs) Can it lower my rank for keywords? (currently we have pretty good rankings (1-5) on many keywords) If there is an impact on rankings - will it be only on specific keywords or will we see a sitewide impact? Assuming that we have taken a hit on traffic, How much time would it take to get the traffic back to normal? and if traffic goes down, by what percentage it may go down and for how much time. (best case, average case and worst case scenarios) Is there anything I should keep in mind while doing this? I understand that there are no clear answers that can be given to these questions but we would like to evaluate a worst case/best case situation. Just to give context : Even a 10 day downtime in terms of drops in rankings is extremely detrimental for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Myntra0 -
Big 301 Redirect Help!
Hey guys I need a little help with setting up a big 301. Background: It's a bit of a mess as the old site is a total mess after being online for 10 years plus. It has html and php pages, and a mod rewrite to redirect old html links to the newer php version of those pages. It's now moving to a new site and as the domain name and URL structure has changed we can't use any fancy regex and have to do a page to page redirect. There are 1500 pages to redirect. However, the old site has thousands of linking root domains, and some of these are to the old html pages (which currently redirect to the php pages) and some to the newer php pages. Question: My initial plan was to leave the mod rewrite and only redirect the php pages. That means 1500 individual redirects instead of 3000 if I individually redirect both the php and html pages. I'm not sure what's best to be honest. We don't really want multiple hops in the redirect (html>php>new site), but surely 1500 redirects is better than 3000! Does anyone have any advice on which option may be best, or even a better option? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarveyP0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
301 redirect or rel=canonical
On my site, which I created with Joomla, there seems to be a lot of duplicated pages. I was wondering which would be better, 301 redirect or rel=canonical. On SeoMoz Pro "help" they suggest only the rel=canonical and dont mention 301 redirect. However, ive read many other say that 301 redirect should be the number one option. Also, does 301 redirect help solve the crawling errors, in other words, does it get rid of the errors of "duplicate page content?" Ive read that re-=canonical does not right? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Tread of backlinks after 301
After 301-ing a domain to a new domain, how should we tread the changing of the backlinks to the old domain? We might be able to have a certain amount changed rather quickly. Should we consider the new domain as a "new" domain, and in this sense, not have them changed quickly, (afraid to trip any filter) Or wil Google see the new domain (after indexing) with the authority of the old domain, so , if the backlinks are direct or coming through a 301 will make no difference? Hope my question is clear and excuses for my english 😛 Thanks for reading and hoping for input,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elgoog0 -
Multiple 301 redirects considered a redirection chain?
I need to redirect a ton of duplicate content, so I want to try redirect 301 /store/index.php /store redirect 301 /store/product-old /store/product-new redirect 301 /store/product-old1 /store/product-new1 redirect 301 /store/product-old2 /store/product-new2 redirect 301 /store/product-old3 /store/product-new3 redirect 301 /store/product-old4/file.html /store/product-old4/new4/file.html and then a whole bunch of old dead links to homepage. So we've had /index.php redirected to / on other parts of the site for awhile, and for the most part /store is a friendly URL, but then we have tons of dup content and work arounds that preceded my job here. I'm wondering if those redirects above would be considered a redirection chain? Since the all the redirects below the /index.php -> /store count on that one redirect. Thanks for any insight you may be able to give!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hondaspeder1
