Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?

    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.

    Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?

    Technical SEO
    4
    8
    2457
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Evo
      Evo last edited by

      Hi Guys

      After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones.  We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR.

      We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected.

      To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following:

      1. In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”.  This happens at server side.
      2. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect.
      3. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page.

      In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!?

      Thanks in advance.

      Dave - www.paysubsonline.com

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Evo
        Evo @ChrisDyson last edited by

        Chris - thanks for the heads up.  It's been a month since we made the changes and we haven't started to crawl back up the rankings yet. I'll see how it goes and report back.

        Cheers

        Dave

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Evo
          Evo @evolvingSEO last edited by

          Dan - thanks for the info.  Looks like we have some tidying up and a few tasks to do!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Evo
            Evo @NeilAnthony last edited by

            I was talking about Google but looking at the reports, we have suffered with Bing and Yahoo too.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • evolvingSEO
              evolvingSEO last edited by

              I would have set up 301s in .htaccess.

              However, I think you may just be citing a correlation not causation.  You have some WAY bigger issues:

              1. The homepage can be arrived at by:

              • paysubsonline.com
              • www.paysubsonline.com
              • paysubsonline.com/index.aspx <--returns a 404
              • www.paysubsonline.com/index.php <-- loads a "coming soon" page, completely different than homepage, though which you can get to - https://paysubsonline.com/howitworks.php and others etc...
              • www.paysubsonline.com/index.html <---returns a 404

              Redirect all possible variations on the homepage to one singular version and fix that old site that's showing up.

              2. Your sitemap has all URLs that look outdated (.htm extension and have "www" while the internal links in your site do not have "www") <--update your XML sitemap and resubmit to webmaster tools

              3. You have not robots.txt file.

              4. You have no canonical tag - which would be the last possible line of defense against all the duplicate content.

              I'd start with those things, hope that helps.

              -Dan

              Evo 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • NeilAnthony
                NeilAnthony @ChrisDyson last edited by

                Yes, that is a very good point.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • ChrisDyson
                  ChrisDyson last edited by

                  Dave,

                  Assuming your 301 redirects are technically correct then it will take time for your new page URLs to be indexed by the major search engines.

                  Be aware that your rankings may not come back 100% as they were before the change.

                  A 301 redirect does not pass all the PR and linkjuice as many SEO's assume. You can read about it in this interview with Matt Cutts and in this illustrated summary from Rand on SEOMoz

                  From my personal experience what you are seeing is normal just keep doing the good work you are currently doing a quite Google search with info:yournewdomain will show if your new domain has been added to the index.

                  NeilAnthony Evo 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • NeilAnthony
                    NeilAnthony last edited by

                    May I know which search engine rankings fell off the radar?

                    If it is the rankings of the old URLs, then it might be because 301 redirection would pass your link juice from the old to the new pages. It might also be good to see your new page's rankings.

                    It might take a little time for the passing of link juice from old to new and thus is the reason for the change in rankings.

                    Evo 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • musthavemarketing

                      301 redirects delay in picking up

                      Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic.  On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin.  I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent.  Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine.  Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?

                      Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing
                      0
                    • vmsolu

                      How to redirect 302 status to 301 status code using wordpress

                      I just ran the link opportunity option within site explorer and it shows that 31 pages are currently in a 302 status.  Should I try to convert the 302's to 301's?  And what is the easiest way to do this? I see several wordpress plugins that claim to do 301 redirects but I don't know which to choose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

                      Technical SEO | | vmsolu
                      0
                    • Emory_Peterson

                      301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap

                      Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing.  You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page.  Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice.  Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!

                      Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson
                      0
                    • SDSLaw

                      Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects

                      Does the sandbox still exist?  What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.

                      Technical SEO | | SDSLaw
                      0
                    • NaescentAdam

                      Index.php and 301 redirect with Joomla

                      Hi, I'm running Joomla 1.7 with SEF on and I'm trying to do a htaccess redirect which fails. I have approximately 100 in effect so far and all working fine, but I have one snag. Index.php is not working as I need it to when it's redirected to www.myurl.com/ If I turn on index.php redirect to root using this code #index.php to root
                      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myurl.com$ [OR]
                      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.myurl.com$
                      RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.myurl.com/" [R=301,L] And then go to www.myurl.com/test.html I'm redirected to the homepage. I think this is because all pages are index.php in joomla. SEOMOZ and Google both think that index.php and root are duplicate pages. Does anyone have any advice for overcoming this? Thanks, Adam

                      Technical SEO | | NaescentAdam
                      0
                    • Artience

                      301 Redirect & Cloaking

                      HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.

                      Technical SEO | | Artience
                      0
                    • nicole.healthline

                      How do search engines treat urls that end in hashtags?

                      How do search engines treat urls that end in hashtags? For example, www.domain.com/abc#xyz.

                      Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline
                      0
                    • dim_d

                      Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?

                      We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr

                      Technical SEO | | dim_d
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.