Very, very confusing behaviour with 301s. Help needed!

[Adido-105399]

Hi SEOMoz gang!

Been a long timer reader and hangerouter here but now i need to pick your brains.

I've been working on two websites in the last few days which are showing very strange behaviour with 301 redirects.

Site A

This site is an ecommerce stie stocking over 900 products and 000's of motor parts. The old site was turned off in Feb 2011 when we built them a new one. The old site had terrible problems with canonical URLs where every search could/would generate a unique ID e.g. domain.com/results.aspx?product=1234.  When you have 000's of products and Google can find them it is a big problem. Or was. We launche the new site and 301'd all of the old results pages over to the new product pages and deleted the old results.aspx.

The results.aspx page didn't index or get shown for months. Then about two months again we found some certain conditions which would mean we wouldn't get the right 301 working so had to put the results.aspx page back in place. If it found the product, it 301'd, if it didn't it redirected to the sitemap.aspx page. We found recently that some bizarre scenerio actually caused the results.aspx page to 200 rather than 301 or 404. Problem. We found this last week after our 404 count in GWMT went up to nearly 90k. This was still odd as the results.aspx format was of the OLD site rather than the new. The old URLs should have been forgetten about after several months but started appearing again!

When we saw the 404 count get so high last week, we decided to take severe action and 301 everything which hit the results.aspx page to the home page. No problem we thought. When we got into the office on Monday, most of our product pages had been dropped from the top 20 placing they had (there were nearly 400 rankings lost) and on some phrases the old results.aspx pages started to show up in there place!!

Can anyone think why old pages, some of which have been 301'd over to new pages for nearly 6 months would start to rank? Even when the page didn't exist for several months? Surely if they are 301's then after a while they should start to get lost in the index?

Site B

This site moved domain a few weeks ago. Traffic has been lost on some phrases but this was mainly due to old blog articles not being carried forward (what i'll call noisy traffic which was picked up by accident and had bad on page stats).

No major loss in traffic on this one but again bizarre errors in GWMT. This time pages which haven't been in existence for several YEARS are showing up as 404s in GWMT. The only place they are still noted anywhere is in the redirect table on our old site. The new site went live and all of the pages which were in Googles index and in OpenSiteExplorer were handled in a new 301 table. The old 301s we thought we didn't need to worry about as they had been going from old page to new page for several years and we assumed the old page had delisted. We couldn't see it anywhere in any index.

So... my question here is why would some old pages which have been 301'ing for years now show up as 404s on my new domain?

I've been doing SEO on and off for seven years so think i know most things about how google works but this is baffling. It seems that two different sites have failed to prevent old pages from cropping up which were 301d for either months or years. Does anyone has any thoughts as to why this might the case.

Thanks in advance.

Andy Adido

[wissamdandan]

Two problems you are experiencing and there is a common thing happening here.

your deleting/not implementing the "old" redirects.

as you know when you redirect page A... as long as there is a website on that domain. you have to always have that redirect. there is no threshold where if you implement a 301 redirect to a page for after a year for example there is no need for it.

This is a good video i posted in the references from matt cutts.

you can concluded "in a way" a 301 redirect will never be deleted especially "when Goog start receiving mix signals about this domain"

so the solution to your problem is you need to implement these old redirect you had before

hope this helps

watch?v=QyQs3tz7ZKo