Wrong redirect used
-
Hi Folks,
I have a query & looking for some opinions.Our site migrated to https://
Somewhere along the line between the developer & hosting provided 302 redirect was implemented instead of the recommended 301 (the 301 rule was not being honured in the htaccess file.)
1 week passed, I noticed some of our key phrases disappear from the serps
When investigated, I noticed this the incorrect redirect was implemented.The correct 301 redirect has now been implemented & functioning correctly.
- I have created a new https property in webmaster tools,
- Submitted the sitemap,
- Provided link in the robots.txt file to the https sitemap
- Canonical tags set to correct https.
My gut feeling is that Google will take some time to realise the problem & take some time to update the search results we lost.
Has anyone experienced this before or have any further thoughts on how to rectify asap.
-
Hi Vettyy & Michael,
Thanks a million for your response.
Implemented both your suggestions, Screaming frog showed the previous 302 are now 301 so everything seems ok on that end. I have also updated Google My Places listing to reflectUsing site:mydomain.com has showed a mixture of https vs http so I am guessing I just need to wait & monitor - cross my fingers & hope for the best.
-
It sounds like you have done all the right things. I agree with Vettyy that you should use something like Screaming Frog to crawl all the old URLs just to double check there are no hanging 404 pages or missed http pages. Switching to 301 will take a few days to filter through, so you could run cache:domain.com in Google on your most important pages to monitor when they are being crawled. Also do you have a mix of http and https in Google in present? It may very well be something to just wait and monitor.
A good tool for sniffing URLs headers is Fiddler.
-
I normally do a fetch and render in Google Search Console (webmaster tools) and submit to index. It gives you the option of submitting an individual page but I normally fetch and render the main domain and then select 'crawl this url and its direct links'. Then if there are only a couple of important pages not being indexed or recognized by Google, fetch and render and submit those individual ones.
type in site:www.yourdomain.com" in Google to monitor manually which pages are indexed as well.
If you have the time I would pop a list of your original urls in screaming frog to see which page their redirecting to, or test a couple of pages using this http://www.wheregoes.com/retracer.php to see how many redirects are in place.
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
-
Redirect Chains
Hi There, I have had conducted a few migrations recently and have a common issue which is this: HTTP (old site) -> HTTPS (old site) -> (HTTPS) (new site) Which causes a redirect chain. How should you prevent this before migration or fix it after migration? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Do you recommend using tabs on desktop in 2017
Hi, I know google is moving toward mobile first world but I am wondering if tabs on desktop are still ignored by google those days and what you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
301 redirects.
Hi everyone, I am having some issues with an a few dynamic URLs that are not redirecting; Example: http://www.example.com/shop-online?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=69164&category_id=303 I first tried to carry out a standard 301 which looked like this; Redirect 301 /longurlwith&category_id=303 http://www.example.com/new-url Which didn't work. After a little bit of research I added the following into the htaccess file; RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^/shop-online$(.*)$ http://www.example.com/shop-online$ [NE,L,R=301] Which caused the website to error 500 (Not cool). So now I am stumped. Any help would be really appreciated as I'm sure it's an easy fix but I can't quite my finger on it. Thanks in advance :).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AduroLabs0