301 redirects aren't passing value.
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We recently migrated our shop to a new platform. We are using Wordpress for our main website, but we wanted a separate installation of Wordpress for our shop, so we left the main blog where it was, but moved the shop to a /shop/ sub directory with it's on WP installation. So now we have 2 installations of Wordpress. However, since we've done this, none of the pages on the new shop are ranking for anything. Their page rank is 0, and Moz page authority is 1 for every page on the new site. I've set up the proper 301 redirects, and they're redirecting fine, but none of the page value is coming over. It's been about a week now, and despite re-crawls by google, I'm not seeing any change. Also, one of the original (now re-directed) product pages still has a Page Authority of 13 according to Open Site Explorer. I know it's not high, but it had us ranking in the top 5 for a very important keyword, and now that value is being wasted.
For example, one of our product pages that was ranking well was
startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template
That page is now redirected to
http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-templateI've done 301's plenty of times and I've never seen this issue, so i'm wondering if it could have something to do with having multiple installations of Wordpress. I can't see any obvious issues with it... i have the Yoast SEO plugin configured properly on both installations, and all of the pages ARE being indexed by google. Not sure what is going on. Anyone have any experience with this, or have any ideas?
Thanks!!
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Interesting. Thanks for the insight!
The reason the sitemap you viewed does not contain links to the new shop products is because that sitemap is generated automatically via the yoast seo plugin. It can't detect the new product pages since they're on the new WP installation in the /shop/ directory. However, I do have a new sitemap here, http://startupfashion.com/shop/sitemap_index.xml with the current product URLs and Categories and it has been submitted to GWT. I initially had those old products and categories removed from the old sitemap, but when I saw that the value wasn't being passed, I decided to put them back as a test because i wondered if perhaps the 301s weren't passing value because Google wasn't seeing those pages anymore. But I'll definitely take them out again, thanks!
As for the double redirect with the forward slash, that's strange. I'll definitely look into it!
Also... i have no clue whats' up with that category typo. I don't think I ever touched that, but it's another thing to look into.
THANKS! -
I am seeing a double hop on the example 301
http://startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template > 301 redirects to > http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/wholesale-line-sheet-template > 301 redirects to > http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-template > and the final page sends a 200.
I made some assumptions on your original URL structure (took out /shop/) looked around and found something similar on
http://startupfashion.com/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell >301> http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell/ >301> http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell > shows 200
The second instance is redirecting a slashed to a non-slashed version.
Your "category" URL has a typo in it
http://startupfashion.com/shop/catgory/fashion-business-guides-and-ebooks
I checked your sitemap
http://startupfashion.com/product-sitemap.xml
Does not have any links to the new product pages. They all reference the old.
You also have a category sitemap with different URLs than your new catgory URL
http://startupfashion.com/category-sitemap.xml
Just on my quick 10 min look, I think you need to
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Double check your 301 redirects
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Make sure there are no "old" links on your site to the old urls
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Make sure the new URLs are properly linked to in your site structure (menus and XML and old blog posts).
It looks like your update may not be as "clean" as you realized.
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