301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?

[JohanMattisson]

Hi,

When pushing our new site live, most of the 301 redirections got done too late for several reasons. Understandably, our site rankings in google have taken a hit now.

So far we have just tried to perfectly optimize the pages that used to rank well (They weren't even optimized before and were still ranking) , to get our positions back.

But does anyone have an idea about what else we could do? Is there a recommended "action plan" when someone is late with their 301 redirections?

[JohanMattisson]

Hi, Tom!

Thanks for the quick response - Yes we have implemented the 301 regardless, so I hope we will see our rankings improve again They actually already have, I checked GA and organic traffic has gone up 100% in the last week, when compared to the previous week. So something must be happening

Thank You,

Johan

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Johan,

As Tom says definately make sure your 301s are in place. Especially for a large site you will want to submit a new sitemap to help indexing the new urls and a user friendly 404 page perhaps noting the redesign and linking to the main areas of the new site would be a good idea if you expect to still be getting traffic to old urls that are not covered by 301s for some reason. The basics in other words, but worth a mention.

[TomRayner]

Hi Johan

Have you implemented the 301s regardless? It may take time, but there should be no reason for the link equity to inevtiably pass to the new URLs and for Google to give the new URLs the same credit, and possibly ranking, as before.

If the redirections are in place and rankings don't recover in, say, a month, then the course of action would be to optimise the new URLs as you would have done previously - making sure the on-page is all in order and then earning high quality links.

There's no magic solution to implementing 301s at a later stage and it works on the same SEO principles as before, but so long as the 301s are now in place then Google should (emphasis on should) eventually give your new URLs the strength the previous URLs had and hopefully promote it in the rankings.