Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.

[waqid]

We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here.

The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back

Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page.

We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3.

hope that makese sense.

[waqid]

Thanks fellas for the replies. After a week and a half the rankigns came back and we actually moved up one spot. Essentially i removed 301's that were very old and were giving google 3 jumps to the new page (meaning there were mulitple old pages that redirected in order of history to the newest one). I also 301d all the old pages to the new page. We also re-enabled a page that was the parent directory of this page (this page linked to the page in question)and had about 150 links (orignally 301d to another page).

Thanks

[Mobilio]

Just as Matt says not all 301 are equal.

And you need to check your sitemap about changing URL. Maybe sitemap holds also old URL?
You need to check your content about old URL too and change it to new one.
You need to check your canonical about old URL and to replace with new one.

For me this is technical SEO/onpage SEO issue and you forget something with 301 redirect.

[MattAntonino]

301 redirects do not pass 100% of the link "juice" you have earned for the original page. There's a longer discussion about it here: https://moz.com/community/q/how-much-juice-do-you-lose-in-a-301-redirect

Most SEOs I know say it generally passes about 90% of the value. But what I've found is that it passes more as each link is rediscovered by Google as well. So if you had an eBay homepage link and it's scraped every 10 minutes, you'd get the juice from that link back much quicker than a blog post from 2011 that Google may never visit again.

I would say just keep working on the site & move forward. You'll either always be around 90% of the previous juice so keep working or you'll gain most of it back over time as those links are re-checked, so ... keep working.