Very Puzzled --- 301 ReDirects Did Not Work - Lost Rankings - Any Thoughts?

[MWM3772]

This one has us stumped and frustrated, hopefully someone out there in SEOMoz land can give us some thoughts and/or suggestions on what's going on and how to remedy.

This is a follow-up to a post I made awhile back.   Here is an excerpt from the original post --

We currently have 3 different versions of our State Business-for-Sale listings pages - the versions are:

Version 1 -- Preferred Version (Links on Homepage www.businessbroker.net)

http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Vermont-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx

Title = Vermont Business for Sale Ads - Vermont Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker (I realize the title needs work)

Version 2:  (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/blistings.ihtml)

URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-Vermont.aspx

Title = Vermont Business for Sale | 120 Vermont Businesses for Sale | BusinessBroker.net

Version 3: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/businessesforsale.ihtml)

URL Prior to 301 change ---   http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_vermont.ihtml

Title = Vermont Businesses for Sale at BusinessBroker.net - Vermont Business for Sale

While the page titles and meta data are a bit different, the bulk of the page content (which is the listings rendered) are identical.

OK, so we decided to test this on 5 of our State pages - I will use VERMONT in this discussion.  We did 301 ReDirects on Version 2 and Version 3 -- they now redirect to Version 1 - we did the redirects and also changed the URL's on the pages.   Prior to the change, we were ranking for keywords like "Vermont Business for Sale" and some other similar keywords -- on 1st page of Google --- now, we have lost our rankings big time.

Did we do something wrong?  I thought when you did 301's the majority of link juice was supposed to be preserved (losing 10% or so) -- this didn't happen in our case.

Any help on what we can do would be appreciated.  We only did 5 States as a test and also noticed big drops for Maine as well.   These were both states where VERSION 2 was the page that was showing up in SERPs.

Thanks in advance for wading through this long post and any help you can provide!!

• Matt

[Vizergy]

I ran your new domain - the one that you redirect the others to - through OSE and there were 58 incoming links but they were from only 2 different root domains.  One of them no longer linked to you when I checked it and the other one was blocked by our security software here at work.  The software stated that it was a 'Verified Threat'.  If the site linking to you is malicious and there are multiple links from that site to your domain Google could be penalizing you for it - once all of the link juice (well, all that WILL pass) is passed via your 301s then this should tip the ratio of good/bad links in to your favor and hopefully fix the issue.  It may be a good idea to look in to the site though.  It could be nothing, our software has been known to block pages that are fine although it is pretty rare... the page that is linking to your page is http://www.onlinebizdirectory.com/business/businesses_for_sale_in_vermont.html

[MWM3772]

not sure I follow this....can you provide a bit more detail?   we did not change anything on the link front.    thanks

[Vizergy]

The page you redirect to has 58 links from two root domains.  One seems not to link to you any more and the other is blocked by Trend Micro here at work calling it a verified threat.... that may be worth looking in to while you wait for the link juice to pass....

[Vizergy]

Doh - I right clicked and copied URLs - I didnt notice - LOL, sorry about that

[MWM3772]

Hi Billy - We did not redirect the California URLs.   Maine and Vermont were redirected.  Thanks, MM

[Vizergy]

Got the same error for http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_california.ihtml

[Vizergy]

I dont know if this is the best tool (just found it using Google) but I used http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php/ and checked http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx and got this:

Either http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx is NOT REDIRECTING to any URL or the redirect is NOT SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY

[HandsomeWeb]

It sounds that you did things correctly (especially testing a few pages first).  Here are a couple of things for your consideration:

Google Takes Time on 301 Redirects

When I did a change of URLs on a site with about 200 pages last month.  The rankings and traffic tanked for two weeks, then reappeared.  It may be taking time for Google to move the value of your version 2 pages to the value of your version 1 page.  You will just have to wait and see.

Duplicate Content Can be Addressed this Way:

If you have three same-content pages, you can keep them all and put a canonical tag on all three that reference version one as the prefered copy.

[MWM3772]

The 301 Redirects were done on 6/21/12 -- so about 6 weeks ago.  No other changes to the pages were made.