Should I reverse renaming of a page that lost value?
-
I have a site with a handful of links that are ranked. One of those links was ranking for "pantsuits for sale". The slug was mysite.com/pantsuits. I decided to rename the slug to mysite.com/pantsuits-for-sale and used the term "pantsuits for sale" twice in the page which it had not been appearing before. I did a 301 redirect old page to new.
I then organized 5 pages below Pantsuits-for-sale in a silo. Before they were all at the same level. I ran 301s for those also.
I suddenly lost 40 spaces in rank a few days later! Clearly Google did not like these changes.
So do you think I can regain my position by reversing the silo and changing back to the old slugs? Other thoughts/ recommendations?
-
Redirects are a funny old thing, and a source of much frustration for many.
I asked John Mueller about this last year and his response was basically, "be patient". There are occasions where a reversed redirect can see an almost immediate change, then other times it seemingly never happens - in the long run, it probably will though.
Just don't go changing back and forth too quickly because this is likely to cause you extra headaches.
-Andy
-
Howdy.
When you do any type of redirect to a ranking page (basically, it's temporary, even though momentary, removal), there is going to be natural drop, since the page, which was there doesn't exist anymore. Reversing back is not always the way to go though. Give it couple days, do fetch as google on redirect. It should go back. Unless, of course, you made other changes, which affected the rankings.
If all this doesn't work - yeah, go ahead and change it back to original. At that point there is nothing to lose, right:)
Hope this helps
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
-
Page Indexing without content
Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?
Technical SEO | | AtuliSulava1 -
Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
Hi all Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue. I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Filter pages - Shopify
Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture/black
Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
/collections/living-room-furniture/fabric Is that ok to make all the above filter/tag pages canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture OR I keep them as it is, so /collections/living-room-furniture/black can rank for filter keywords, example: black living room furniture, /collections/living-room-furniture/fabric fabric living room furniture etc. Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Note - already removed the main category content from filter pages, updated meta tags as well. Please advice, thank you0 -
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
What is Too Many On-Page Links?
in campaigns i see " Too Many On-Page Links " what is this ? can anyone please tell me ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Drupal duplicate pages
Anyone else encountered massive numbers of duplicate pages being reported on SEO Moz crawls for Drupal based sites? I assumed it was b/c there was no redirect on the print format pages, so I fixed that with a cannonical tag. But still seeing 2 or 3 duplicate pages reported for many pages. Any experience fixing this would be awesome to hear about. Thanks, Kevin
Technical SEO | | kevgrand0 -
Redirecting over-optimised pages
Hi One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site. I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks. My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Page rank and ranking down
Hi I blog at Technostarry. Some 3 months back during page rank update, my page rank went down from 3 to 2. I don't know the reason behind this. And now, my traffic and ranking is also down. I am not involved in any bad SEO practices, I don't copy paste and I write original content. I am too confused as why and what has happened with my site. If someone could analyze my blog and look at my weak points then that would be great. I would like to get any suggestions to get back my ranking and also page rank back. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | technotech0