How do I recover from a double 301 mistake?
-
We have a site that was ranking top 10 for 15 KW and top 20 for about 40. We decided to restructure the site to create silos. The old site used a plugin to create ".html" pages and the juice in Google was all on those pages.
We asked our developer to eliminate the plugin / .html and forward the .html pages to our new structure.
Instead, he took a shortcut and did a mass forward in code which resulted in all pages - such as "example.com/mypage.html" now forwarding to "example.com/mypage/" - He then did a 301 redirect from those pages with the "/" such as example.com/mypage/ to "example.com/my-new-page/". He did this for over 500 pages.
To make matters worse, he mis-mapped about 100 pages and Google saw them as 404s, then in fixing those errors, new ones kept popping up. Those are now fixed.
The net result is that we dropped like a stone on all of our rankings.
Moving forward, do you think we can regain ground by manually doing 301s for the original .html pages to their new locations and eliminating the interim step?
What would be your suggestions to recover as quickly as possible?
-
Gotcha, ok well that's a relief. In troubleshooting the drop we are looking at a few more factors. Do any of these sound suspicious?
1. In redirecting everything, our developer was sloppy. There were slug conflicts all over the place and this resulted in hundreds of 404s and mis-directed pages (pages redirected to y instead of x), which he only corrected after we manually found the 404s. We went through 5 or 6 rounds of this.
2. We had over 100 pages without titles and he ran some script that rewrote a lot of existing titles. When we discovered this, he went back and fixed all the titles but only after Google reported 100+ duplicate titles.
3. We installed an internal link building plugin (that we've since deleted) and created business rules for cross linking. This resulted in hundreds of cross links with exact anchor text of the slug / page titles. As mentioned, we've since rolled this back but since the site only has about 50 external backlinks, wondering if the internal link building over-optimized and triggered a penalty. If this is something you think they'd ding us for, now that we've fixed the internal links, do you think Google will give us back some juice? Or is it gone daddy gone?
Otherwise, our pages rank 95%-98% optimized according to Moz and we have zero technical issues at this stage.
-
To be honest, it all looks correct and that would have been the way I did it. If Google is currently not ranking the correct URL, it'll likely update when they take the 301 into account when they next recrawl the page.
It might be a factor in why rankings have dropped but it's likely to pick back up again when their index is updated. My advice is to hold tight and hope it all fixes itself soon.
All the best,
Sean
-
Thanks Sean,
No, he first redirected the .html pages in code so:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+([^.]+).html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1/ [R=301,L]So 500+ pages were redirected from .html to /
Step 2, he made manual 301s from the / to the new structure so for instance "example.com/mypage/" redirected to "example.com/new-parent/my-new-page/"
But Google has ranked example.com/mypage.html
So the question is - would doing the above be a contributor to losing our ranks? If so, would we benefit by manually linking "example.com/mypage.html" to "example.com/new-parent/my-new-page/" and therefore skipping the interim step?
Second, you mentioned having so many redirects could be problematic. Our reason for the change was to create a hierarchy - before we started, there were 500 pages with no parent...no hiearchy at all. So we created a silo structure and a proper site map. The 500 pages now belong to this hiearchy and the slugs are all different than before. Do you have a suggestion for a better way to do the 301s other than manually in this case?
Thanks for the advice!
-
Hey there,
My advice would be to minimize those redirect chains as soon as you can, not just for potential SEO benefit but more to lessen server stress and speed up page load.
Interestingly, chained 301s don't lose equity in the eyes of a search engine now (see updates below) so it's interesting that you're seeing such a fluctuation.
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
For the .html to trailing slash pages, did you say that he did a page-to-page remap for all of them instead of putting a redirect rule in place to catch them all? That seems like a crazy thing to put in place! Your redirect file (htaccess or similar) must be enormous!
Hope that helps,
Sean
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
-
How to Check 301 Done Properly on Homepage
Hi All, I posted previously about this, and had some good advice (thanks!)... but not quite sure my problem has been fixed. About a month ago we changed our hosting over, and our dev didn't coordinate to have both versions of our homepage redirected to the same URL. Our crawl showed up with every single page as duplicate content, and our organic traffic has since dropped by over 60%. They have told me that it is fixed as of last Monday, and a redundant error that was appearing in my Google Analytics now says that it has been fixed, but Moz crawled my site 2 days ago and still says everything is duplicate content, and my organic traffic is stressing me out! Any advice on how I can check this is done for myself, rather than trusting these guys haven't messed it up any further? Or is it possible the Moz crawl is a bit slower? Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | b4cab0 -
How long for authority to transfer form an old page to a new page via a 301 redirect? (& Moz PA score update?)
Hi How long aproximately does G take to pass authority via a 301 from an old page to its new replacement page ? Does Moz Page Authority reflect this in its score once G has passed it ? All Best
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan3 -
Cleaning Up Bad 301 External Links From Old Site
A relatively new site I'm working on has been hit really hard by Panda, due to over optimization of 301 external links which include exact keyword phrases, from an old site. Prior to the Panda update, all of these 301 redirects worked like a charm, but now all of these 301's from the old url are killing the new site, because all the hyper-text links include exact keyword matches. A couple weeks ago, I took the old site completely down, and removed the htaccess file, removing the 301's and in effect breaking all of these bad links. Consequently, if one were to type this old url, you'd be directed to the domain registrar, and not redirected to the new site. My hope is to eliminate most of the bad links, that are mostly on spammy sites, that aren't worth linking to. My thought is these links would eventually disappear from G. My concern is that this might not work, because G won't re-index these links, because once they're indexed by G, they'll be there forever. My fear is causing me to conclude I should hedge my bets, and just disavow these sites using the disavow tool in WMT. IMO, the disavow tool is an action of last resort, because I don't want to call attention to myself, since this site doesn't have a manual penalty inflected on it. Any opinions or advise would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | alrockn0 -
301 redirect question from a newb
So, I've been blogging for almost 3 years now. I've always used wordpress, but recently changed from a ProPhoto theme to a Woo Theme (Editorial...don't know if that matters). I've signed up for the SEOmoz website and HOLY CROW I have problems with my website out the wazoo. I am tackling issues one at a time and one of my issues seems to be 301 redirects. If you'd like to see a screen shot of the crawl diagnostics, check it out the attachment. If you'd like screen shots of anything else, just let me know. I'm not sure I'm reading the chart right, but it seems to say that all of my redirecting problems are because my links are redirecting from an http://www..... to a http://http://www... I've been in my wordpress blog post back end and can't seem to figure out how they A. Got like this. and B how to fix it. If I'm reading the chart wrong...definitely let me know. Thank you guys so much in advance! Screen%20Shot%202012-01-01%20at%202.28.19%20PM.png
Moz Pro | | TerraDawn0 -
Is Open Site Explorer ignoring 301 redirects now?
I just recently saw a huge decline in the page rank of a specific page on my site. When I investigated a bit further I noticed that the drop in page rank looks like it is due to the fact that most of the links to the page come through 301 re-directs from an old page. I know you just made a change to Open Site Explorer. Did you change the way that you are treating 301 re-directs? Here is the new page: http://www.justjen.com/shop/big-sister-tshirts.htm Here is the old page: http://www.justjen.com/shop/bigsister-tshirts.htm Up until the last couple of days, the new page was showing the links from the old page in your cache, but as of today, the new page is only showing the links that go to it, not the links to the old page that is re-directed to it. If there was a change recently, was this intentional (trying to replicate the search engines better) or is it an oversight or database anomaly?
Moz Pro | | gametv0 -
Open Site Explorer Issue - Pullng up No-follow links when settings ask for Follow + 301 Redirect..
Anybody else having this issue? Here lately when I am doing competitive research on open site explorer I set it to only pull up followed + 301 redirects and it will still pull up no-follow competitors links. Can anybody help me out here?
Moz Pro | | axzm0 -
Site is showing forwarded /301 to another website
My site http://riyas.in is showing a 301 redirect or a forward to http://flicker.com/muhammedriyas . I had done a 301 redirect long before from my site to this domain, but i removed that after 2-3 days. Please help me to solve this problem. I attached a screen shot seomoz1.jpg
Moz Pro | | riyas_0 -
301 finder SEO Tool
Hi there, I´m looking for a tool, which shows all 301 redirect links to a domain. Have some competitors which haven´t many links but have quite good rankings. I suppose they have some 301 redirections... Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheLastSeo0