301 redirects broken - problems - please help!
-
Hi,
I have a bit of an issue...
Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year.
All well and good.
However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated.
Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+).
It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it?
Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it?
Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Amelia
-
Thank you. The 301s have been put back. I did wonder if I needed to do anything at all! (I'm a great believer in leaving well alone - why poke a wasp's nest if you don't need to lol)
Over the last month there has actually been a slight increase in organic traffic to the new website.
My concern is that some pages seem to have been removed from the index. Also (which I didn't say above) that impressions have gone down - however this could be seasonal rather than anything sinister.
Do you know of a tool that shows you which urls are in the index - aside from Google, I mean - something I can extract into a spreadsheet?
Thank you for helping me again today
-
Hi Amelia
You shouldn't include a link to the XML sitemap - it lives off the domain and you can resubmit (or submit depending on if you haven't before) your sitemap XML to WMT and Bing WMT, so you will be fine there as far as them crawling it. You can also include it in the robots.txt.
Not telling you what to do here, but my thoughts would be to put the old URL back up and 301 redirect it to the new location. This will give crawlers the opportunity to catch that the old site is now the new site (especially if you have done a change of address in WMT) and also let them know on that new site homepage about the rebrand. This puts the old brand on the new brand's site in the content, thus creating association.
Unless I am missing something here, it's a matter of putting the old site back up, redirecting it, letting WMT know about the change of address (which you did), and allowing crawlers enough time to recognize that change, which it seems to already have done with your organic traffic boost.
Have you seen your organic traffic for the new site decrease at all?
Hope this helps and hope I understood what is happening here. Let me know if you have any more questions. Good luck!
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
-
Will URLS With Existing 301 Redirects Be as Powerful As New URLS In Serps?
Most products on our site have redirects to them from years of switching platform and merely trying to get a great and optimised URL for SEO purposes. My question is this: If a product URL has alot of redirects (301's), would it be more beneficial to me to create a duplicated version of the product and start fresh with a new URL? I am not on here trying to gain backlinks but my site is tn nursery dot net (proof:)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tammysons
I need some quality help figuring out what to do.
Tammy0 -
How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement. Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet. So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old. Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss0 -
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
Can anyone point me to the best way to implement 301 redirects on a Ruby on Rails website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
Looking for SEO Help- Magento Temporary Redirects
We recently launched a new site (www.CanyonOS.com) on Magento Enterprise. We have run several crawl tests with Moz and keep receiving 302 redirect errors. We've used the admin console for our site to apply 301 redirects in every area that we could but have had no success. (Last audit was completed on August 14) We are receiving 301 redirects on the following types of pages totaling 43k issues 😞 A majority of these issues are when adding and comparing products to the following types of urls. domain.com**/catalog/**product_compare/ domain.com**/wishlist/**index/add/product/ domain.com**/checkout/**cart/add/ Any suggestions from any SEO gurus? Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CanyonOS0 -
Help understanding 301 domain redirect
Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain. Here is what I would like to know.... When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen? 1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one? 2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain? 3. or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
When is it time to kill 301 redirects
3 months we updated our site design design and as such lots of page urls changed. At the time we 301 redirected about 100 pages. (All pages are on the same domain - 301 redirects like .com/about-us/company to .com/company) Anyhow my question is should I leave these redirects active indefinitely or kill them assuming value has passed through by now? Your Thoughts are welcomed. Thanks, Glen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
Please, help me to understand these Google results
Hello here, I am eager to know your thoughts on this. If I search on Google for "fur elise violin sheet music", we are on the second page for our sheet music title of "Fur Elise for violin and piano" (look for "virtualsheetmusic.com"). Ok, that's not very good and I still have an hard time to figure out why there are many crappy and NOT really related websites listed before us, but here is the best (weird) part... .... search now for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" which should narrow the query further down and so increase the chances for us to get on the first page results... and in fact we are on the first page with that query, but for a different page and a different music for a different instrument! If you scroll the first page of the results, you will find our site at the end of the 1st page for our version of "Fur Elise" for "viola and piano" and not for "violin and piano"... What the heck!??! Why's that??? Doesn't make any sense too me... why if the user search for "fur elise violin and piano" Google shows "Fur Elise for viola and piano"???!! I would really appreciate any thoughts on all this. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0