301 Re-Directs Puzzling Question on Page Returned in Search Results
-
On our website, www.BusinessBroker.net, we have 3 different versions of essentially the same page for each of our State Business for Sale Pages. Back in August, we did a test and did 301 redirects using 5 States. For a long while after doing the redirects, the pages fell out of Google search results - we used to get page 1 rankings. Just recently they started popping back up on Page 1. However, I noticed that the new page meta data is not what is being picked up -- here is the example.
Keyword Searched for in Google -- "Maine Business for Sale"
Our listing shows up on Page 1 -- # 8 Result
URL returned is correct preferred version: - http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
However, the Page Title on this returned page is still the OLD page title -
OLD TITLE -- maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker
Not the title that is designated for this page -
New Title - Maine Businesses for Sale - Buy or Sell a Business in ME | BusinessBroker.net
Ditto for Meta Description.
Why is this happening?
Also have a problem with lower case showing up rather than upper case -- what's causing this?
http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
versus -- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks, MM
-
thanks - we did some more research on our end and our developer found this --
The problem with the title, description and keywords is because we updated these for just Wyoming, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine and Florida. I made the mistake of assuming the URL would always have the proper case of the state in the URL but as we have discovered that was a bad assumption. The code was looking for those 5 states with the first letter capitalized and the link from Google was not so it defaulted to the format for the other states that we haven't changed yet. I have fixed that code so now those 5 states will display the correct title, description and keywords regardless of the case of the state in the URL. I will update the live site in the morning so this issue will be taken care of. We will still need to discuss the how best to handle the URLs that Google is getting with the incorrect case.
-
I can't say for sure what happened last time since I am not exactly sure what you did. But as long as the 301 redirects are set up correctly and Google is not having any trouble accessing and crawling them, then you shouldn't experience any major negative results over the long term.
Now that I've read your initial post again, I see that the Maine page is one of the States you tried to redirect as part of your test. However, as I posted above, the old page is not being 301 redirected to the new page, so Google may have dropped your site in the rankings since you essentially had two very similar pages competing against each other for the same terms.
-
The page that is ranking #8 in Google for me is http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx, and on that page, it has the old Title tag and it is not redirected to the version of the URL with the new Title tag.
When I visit http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx, I am seeing the new Title tag.
Since these are two completely different pages you will need to 301 redirect the URL with the old Title tag to the new one. That should solve your problems.
-
follow up question regarding the upper and lower case question from our web developer ---
The question hasn't been how to do it. The question is what happens to all of the pages that are indexed by Google improperly when we do this? Are we going to see the same thing as when we redirected the states with a big drop for 6 months?
Keith
-
Thanks for the response, appreciate it. I'm pretty confident we re-directed the non-preferred URLs to this preferred page --
http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
This page has the updated Title Tag, Meta Description, etc. however, is not the one that shows up in the Google Search Result for "Maine Business for Sale"
-
I visited the page http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx and the Title tag in the HTML is "maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker" so perhaps you did not publish the new versions of the Title tags?
As for your lower case/upper case issue, I went to both URLs and they both resolve to an active page. I would suggest making the URLs consistent to minimize the risk of duplicate content. First, I would set the designated URL in the rel="canonical" tag for each page. And depending on the type of server, I would suggest forcing the URLs to 301 redirect to a single version of the URL. Here is a good blog post on how to address this specific issue - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/common-technical-seo-problems-and-how-to-solve-them
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
-
HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
Hi, I've just migrated our previous site (siteA) to our new url (siteB) and I've setup 301 redirects from the old url (siteA) to the new (siteB). However, the old url operated on https and users who try to go to the old url with https (https://siteA.com) receive a message that the server cannot be reached, while the users who go to http://siteA.com are redirected to siteB. Is there a way to 301 redirect https traffic? Also, from an SEO perspective if the site and all the references on Google search are https://siteA.com does a 301 redirect of http pass the domain authority, etc. or is https required? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | opstart0 -
Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage
Hi Everyone, I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution? For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets. Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
Search Results not Updating (Title, Description, and URL)
Issue: I recently discovered that my site was accessible by both HTTP and HTTPS. The site has used a rel canonical tag to point to the HTTP version. Google+ was pointing to HTTPS though. The title, description, and URL shown in the results for the homepage is HTTPS, other pages are HTTP, etc... Steps taken to Resolve: This week I did the following... 301'd all non-checkout pages to the HTTP version Switched Google+ URL to HTTP version and added new post with an HTTP link to the homepage. Used webmaster tools to recrawl and reindex the site Resubmitted XML Sitemap No luck... the site is still not updating... any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all! Site is Here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes0 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
Help! Optimizing dynamic internal search results pages...
Hi guys, Now I have always been against this, and opted to noindex internal search results pages to stop the waste of link juice, dupe content, and crawl loops... however, I'm in a discussion with somebody who feels there may be a solution, and that the pages could actually be optimized to rank (for different keywords to the landing pages of course). Anybody come across such a thing before? My only solution would be still to noindex and then build static pages with the most popular search results in but that won't suffice in this case. Any recommendations would be much appreciated 🙂 Thanks, Steve 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0 -
Rankings for Home vs. Internal Pages - Potential 301?
Hi everyone: A site I'm working with until recently was ranking page 1 for its primary keyword. For the last month, they've dropped to page 4. One thing we've noticed is that the page that is ranking is an internal page (http://www.example.com/keyword-string) and at this point, everything ranking above us is ranking based on the root domain (http://www.competitor.com). We've eliminated Panda, penalties, and any other obvious causes for the drop in rankings. We have similar or better page rank, external links, domain trust, etc. in comparison to the sites still ranking page 1. We think this may be part of our problem. Has anyone else dealt with this? What did you do to change it and how did it work? We're considering eliminating the existing internal page and 301'ing to the home page. The keyword in question is the core of the business, so this is a natural change, but we're loath to lose years of investment in promoting the internal page. Also, the site was originally optimized with the primary keyword throughout (appears in META tags, headers on multiple pages). How important is it to clear these out to make Google see the home page as most relevant? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdcomms0
