Old URL redirect to New URL

[kaje]

Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index.

Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic.

What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Joe

[Dr-Pete]

Oh, got it - so this is a standard 301-redirect scenario, but Google just isn't honoring it for some reason. That's unusual, certainly. Have you checked the headers? I use the SEOBook tool, for example?

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

I don't mean this to be in any way condescending, but I always double-check them, across a variety of URLs. You have to make sure that the redirects are working the way you think they're working (and aren't chained to other redirects, etc.).

Did you redirect page-by-page, in the sense that every old URL has a new URL? Sometimes, the home-page or main-page redirects work, but deeper redirects fail (due to minor changes or incomplete .htaccess code).

Did anything else happen during the change? Did you change the URL structure, design, etc.?

Did the "new" (to you) domain have any existing history? Is it possible you inherited a problem, like bad links or a bad history?

[kaje]

No I did not change them multiple times. When I launched my redesign on a new domain name (without dashes) I did a change of address within Google Webmaster tools then proceeded to create 301 redirects to direct the old url's to the new site. The site is still showing up in the SERPS so I'm trying to find another way if at all possible.

[Dr-Pete]

Can you clarify - did you change them and then change them back? I'm not sure if we're dealing with one set of 301s or two sets, sequentially over time. Changing and changing back can get dicey.

Another option would be to use canonical tags - sometimes, if 301s aren't working (especially if you've changed them a couple of times), switching signals can help. I think Google starts ignoring certain signals at times, especially if things are changing too often. Using another signal (like rel-canonical instead of or in addition to 301s) can kick them back into gear.

[KeriMorgret]

Rather than remove the old URLs, why not just go into Google Webmaster Tools and give them a change of address?

[kaje]

Thanks Ankit Maheshwari for your help. I will give that a try.

[Webmaster_SEO]

Google is really giving troubles in identifying 301 these days and persists showing old URL's. Here is a suggestion that you can work with:

First make sure that you have 301 redirect all old pages to respective new URLs.

Do a quick check using the Fetch as Googlebot to see the response code of old URLs OR see the cache of old URL's which should show corresponding new URL and its data.

If all is well technically, I recommend that use the remove for Google Index feature of Webmaster tool and remove one of the old URL's that is currently ranking. Monitor the change over a couple of weeks to see if new URL start to appear in rankings or for fluctuations in traffic (for old and new URL from your analytics report)

If this approach works, then repeat it for other URL's.