Whats the best way to revive a directory that was 301'd and now I want to remove that?
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Last year i 301'd one of my directories on my site, pointing everything to a different directory. Long story short I am going to sell this product line again and would like to just remove the 301 to that original directory, but I am reading that the 301s are also cached in most browsers for a long time. Has anyone successfully done this and if you did what was it that you had to do?
Thanks
Mike
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I agree with @Jimmy. Remove the 301's, ensure internal and some external links point to the new URLs and update the XML sitemap. As for the browsers saving the 301s, here what I found:
- IE7, IE8, Android 2.3.4 do not cache at all.
- Firefox 18.0.2, Safari 5.1.7 (on Windows 7), and Opera 12.14 all cache, and clear the cache on browser restart.
- IE10 and Chrome 25 cache, but do not clear on browser restart
There was a write up about redirecting 301's using 302 but I recommend using the above method instead... http://goo.gl/Z1uEr
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Remove the 301 then, get links to the new site. Add a sitemap and make sure there are no duplication between the two sites of content. If your 301 was listed in Webmaster tools then remove it and also set the new as a preferred site and verify it.
Also generate an XML sitemap and submit that to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc
That should do it... It won't happen over night...
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