301 Redirect and SEO Rankings
-
I recently restructured my webpage URL's (about 300 ~ 75% of my total website) to make the URL paths more SEO friendly. Within a few hours of restructuring the pages, I did a 301 redirect to my old URL's and pointed them to the new pages. I have seen ~ 50% drop in organic traffic.
I started the restructuring exercise 14 days ago and finished it a few hours back. I have 3 questions:
- How long will it take for me to recover my old traffic. Will I recover most of it or some of it?
- Due to a glitch in the specified path, some old URL's were wrongly redirected (this happened with 9 pages to be exact). I will explain exactly what happened:
www.redirct.com/superseonow1 ---- redirected to ---- www.redirectnow.com/seonow1
**/superseonow was 301 redirected to /seonow. After 3 days I realize that /superseonow1 was actually /supernow1. The same thing happened to 9 pages - /superseonow2, /superseonow3 ..... **
I have removed all the wrong redirects. When I tried to enter the correct (old) paths now and 301 redirect them to the new paths, the page was not found using the old paths.
Should I redirect the old paths to the New ones even now?
3. Finally, in how much time after you change the page structure should you use the 301 redirect. Since I had two different teams working on this job, there could have been up to a 24 hour gap between the redirection.
-
Morgan,
Thank you for your insight. I've been pulling my hair out with how much traffic has been lost with the 301 redirects. I've come to the conclusion that we have to, in a way, start our SEO efforts over again specifically with the inbound links. Your comments just gave me a positive direction to move towards. Thank you.
- Conrad
-
Thanks for that Mike.
With regard to point no 2 - Page 1 is the old URL & Page 2 is the new URL. But a wrong Page 1 URL was entered to redirect it to page 2. There is no Page 3.
In effect, what has happened is that a page (which did not ever exist) was being redirected to Page 2 while the correct page 1 path was never redirected. Now I have removed all those (wrong) 301 redirects. But when I try to redirect the correct Page 1 URL path to Page 2 now, it does not redirect.
The address bar shows me a crazy long URL path (like its coming from cache) when I enter the page 1 URL path.
-
Whenever you change URLs, you'll see an initial drop in traffic as Google finds and reindexes these pages. You should see a bounce back in traffic after that, but it may not be what it was before if you used 301 redirects. 301 redirects only pass 85 - 90% of link equity, so all of the pages you've 301'd are now 10 - 15% less authoritative than they were before. Depending on how you were ranking before and the strength of your competitors, this loss of link equity could have negatively affected your position on SERPs. The only way to get this link equity back is to have all of the pages linking to your old pages link to the new pages (get them to directly link to your new page), or to get enough quality links to your new page that compensate for the loss in equity.
-
1. Assuming the pages are 100% exactly the same except for the URL, you should bounce back without a problem.
2. If i'm getting this right... Page 1 is the Old URL & Page 2 is the New URL but Page 1 accidentally redirected to Page 3. Now you want to know if Page 1 should be correctly redirected to Page 2 like originally intended? Yes.
3. While its always best to try to redirect as soon as possible, a 24 hour period of the page 404ing prior to redirection will not kill you.
Also you may want to update your Sitemap to swap the old URLs for the correct new URLs (if necessary), submit the updated sitemap to Google & Bing webmaster tools as needed, submit the new pages in Bing WMT & do some fetch requests in Google WMT to potentially speed up the crawl & indexing of the new pages.
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
-
My site auto redirects http to https. This is causing redirect chains. What can I do?
I noticed that Moz flags a lot of redirect chain issues on my site. I realized that this is mostly because the site automatically redirects http to https, and when I create a new URL (when a URL changes, for example) it is automatically flagged as a chain. Example: http://www.example-link Auto directs to: https://www.example-link Which is then redirected to: https://www.example-link-changed (when the address actually changes) I don't seem to have any control over changing where the initial http redirect goes. Any advice on fixing this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | baystatemarketing0 -
Index SEO Performance
Hi guys, I was wondering if there is a difference in SEO performance between a page which ends with .html or just with a slash. For example: www.domain.com/test/ - www.domain.com/test.html Which one is better? And is there a difference between productpages and productcategory pages. Because we see mostly productpages ending with .html and category pages ending with a slash. Take a look at some big dutch companies like: http://www.coolblue.nl/
On-Page Optimization | | Happy-SEO
http://www.bol.com/
https://www.zalando.nl/ (product page) There are doing this with a reason.... i guess.... Thanks.1 -
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
A good SEO praxis?
Hi all, having a worpress site with 10 DIFFERENT pages (each with its own different content) and consequently 10 DIFFERENT keywords to optimize......Can somehow Google penalize me for having such a number of different keyowrds? I guess sometimes there no way to avoid it. It depends on the content of each page. You'll need a keyword to optimize them (if you consider they are relevant enough). Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Do Blog Comments On Your Site Help SEO?
There is a lot of debate as whether or not having comments on your blog is helpful from an SEO perspective. Proponents believe that more comments (1) creates more content, which search engines love, (2) creates more relevant keywords that can be searched, and (3) helps with "freshness" of the site/content leading to greater site authority. Others like Joost de Valk believe that comments can actually hurt SEO because keyword density cannot be controlled. He argues that his top SEO content are pages not posts for this very reason. What is your opinion?
On-Page Optimization | | marcperry0 -
Images being ranked
I have a client who is concerned about the performance of his images ranking on Google Images. I have taken a look at the obvious things like - alt tags, title tags , file names. I am not sure why he is struggling quite so much to get his images ranked well as the sites he is competing against and who are already ranking are a very poor quality. This is his site - http://www.ukweddingfavours.co.uk Would really appreciate your feedback and I can dish out some good answers.
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0 -
SEO for spanish website
Hi, A client has given us the site http://www.comtranslations.com/Home.html for optimization. He wants to optimize only the spanish part ( the link is on the top right ). By clicking on the link Espanol, the url opened is - http://www.comtranslations.com/Principal.html. He wants seo for this website for spanish keywords. The keywords are - Traducción
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_2005
Traductor
traducir español inglés
traducción My question is how do we go about this ? Shall we purchase a software that translates spanish to english ? Thanks0 -
AB Testing - Organic Rank
Hello, Currently We are running an A/B test on a few pages, the footer and the header on our site. I was wondering what is the proper way to do an a/b test so that our google rankings won’t fall and that Google will only index one version at this time? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Tonyd230