SEO Tomfoolery
-
Oh Hai,
I recently changed the permalink structure on my Wordpress based site, southwestbreaks.co.uk from the standard ?p=123 to a more SEO chummy /%postname%/. As a result, my site has completely dropped off the board for all my previously well ranked search phrases.
Having since gotten into SEOmoz a bit more, I can see there are WP plugins available that apparently would've done this a lot more smoothly.
I'd be most grateful if someone could explain if this drop off is just temporary, or have I somehow entered Google's shun book? The site has been like this for about 48 hours.
Thanks,
Tim
-
Thanks for the quick responses.
Currently, visiting a page on my site using the old permalink structure redirects one to the same page on the new setup, so I'm guessing there is a redirect in place, all be it a 302? (all I did was change the structure in the permalinks tab on WP, nothing else).
Should I still do what you suggest with the htaccess file?
-
Hi Tim,
hmmm..that is a quick response from Google!
I suspect your problem is that you have unintentionally broken all of the indexed links in the google search results- Ouch! ...and any external links to posts from other sites - Ouch again!!
Basically, Google has the URL of your pages indexed, but you have changed all of the URL's without creating a 301 (permanent) redirect. So, when a user clicks that link in the Search Results page it returns a 404 Not found error.
Ah..I see that Dan has explained what you need to do to fix the problem.
Sha
-
Hi
Did you 301 Redirect the old pages to the matching new pages? Anytime you change URLs you have to do this, it redirects your link juice as well as anyone trying to access an old page with a link or bookmark - they'll arrive at the new page instead of getting a 404 (page not found).
You do 301 redirects in your .htaccess file (insert them after the wordpress info) in this format;
Redirect 301 /oldpage/ http://www.mydomain.com/newpage/
One line for every page you're redirecting. If you are using the new Yoast WP SEO plugin, you can edit your .htaccess file directly from WordPress, otherwise you have to edit it via FTP
BONUS: An easy way to get your old and new URLs so you do not have to type them all out, is run something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Xenu Link Sleuth on your site, and export the URLs into excel.
-Dan
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
-
SEO for products that are on sale in cubic meters (m³)
Hi All, I have some products that we sale that are defined by their cubic meters (m³) Question will Google prefer a URL with /bin/3m³ or /bin/3m3 Any suggestions would be great! Obviously for cleanliness I would prefer m³ over m3 Thanks
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Canonical link tag for https - any disadvantages for SEO?
Hi Mozzers, We have a website that has both http as well as https indexed. I proposed the solution of implementing a canonical link tag on all pages (including the login/secure ones). Any disadvantages I could expect? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
SEO is DEAD – Long live ADWORDS
SEO is dead and the winner is ….. Google Adwords Do you agree??? Shares in Google inc on October 24th were trading well over $1,000 per share, joining an elite club of super-shares having risen 42% since the start of 2013. And the reason is in one word ….. “Adwords” If your email inbox is anything like mine, you will have noticed a change in your “junk” emails that get past your filters. The spammers have given up on targeting “penial-enlargement” products (because every spam filter in the world is blocking them) to so-called-legitimate-business activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or “How to Get your company to #1 on Google” The truth is all those thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours “we”, “you” and your company spent on increasing your Google “organic” rankings over the last five years have been a total waste of money…… and Google are totally to blame … and are making a total gain Once-upon-a-time you could get #1 ranking on google by using clever and current SEO techniques such as link-building, elimination of duplicate content, keyword density etc etc … terms many of you in business will have heard so-called-SEO-experts spruiking too many times and persuading you to part with $$$$ in cash to fix. How many of those so-called-SEO-experts told you you could save thousands of dollars by adopting a simple a cost effective Google adwords campaign??? Not many, the SEO industry is self-promoting and full of smoke-and-mirror (snake-oil) salesman promises. In recent times Google have….. a) Increased the number of paid ads at the top of the page from 1 to 3
Technical SEO | | Webjobz
b) increased the number of lines their paid adverts take up
c) increased the % of the “above-the-fold” advertising space to paid adverts
d) reduced the distinguishment between paid and organic ads to such an extent that around 50% of us cannot determine what is a paid or organic ad anymore. Being #1 “organically” (un-paid) in Google will NOW only get you 9% of the clicks on that page. 42% of all clicks goes to the top three “paid” listings (Adwords) If you want to get traffic to your site so that people purchase your products, move your marketing budget AWAY from SEO and web design and invest in Google Adwords as soon as possible. It is very easy to setup and administer yourself [staff removed links to copy of blog post]0 -
Can these Yoast SEO integration issued be solved?
I had a site analysis done by the Yoast team. Of course, one of their recommendations was to install the Yoast SEO product. I see that there are many independent sources highly recommending it. But my programming is coming back with some concerns. My website is www.heartspm.com, for anyone who is interested in further analysis of my issue. My programmer's notes follow. Unfortunately, they are a bit to cryptic: "1. it does not do all for us anyway, so we'd have to keep the one's I made
Technical SEO | | GerryWeitz
before anyway, at least partially, but it will add up to complexety, loading
time as all new, and especially one-size-fits all plugins 2. another problem - Simple Press forum. Yoast does not have an extention for it, nor is it going to work along with our existing forum's SEO handling solution. So, it's
either reverting back to original SEO handling or forgetting Yoast. 3. original handling means no meta description although I think Yoast will put just
one description for each page, and title will be something like "<forum <br="">title> - <topic title="">whatever else you may want" 4. the same thing with XML sitemap 5. we won't be able to use Yoast's because it won't handle cities 6. and hopefully it will work with our existing XML sitemap solution as this can be turned off" Now, The Yoast team admitted and logically said that the Yoast plugin cannot support another plugin and therefore it does not support forums. We currently integrate the forum into our Wordpress site and perhaps imperfectly, but we are able to append forum links to the xml sitemap. Do any of you have insight into how one incorporates a forum into a Wordpress blog while using Yoast SEO?</topic></forum> We have special parameter based handling of cities. We used to pass codes like city=?zip and the like. Now, the URLS are very clean looking, but they use templates to match up cities in a city table with content that is somewhat similar, yet customizable. So my programmer seems to be saying that the Yoast tool doesn't seem to handle templates well or is not able to interpret it and get it into a sitemap. Do any of you have insight into using Yoast SEO with Wordpress sites that use templates and variables for locals or something of a similar nature? The Yoast SEO module also has switches to help resolve issues with duplicate content and archives and authors and multiple pages, i.e. page 1-10 of Latest News. If I can't use the whole Yoast module, are there ways to use only parts of it or to strip it down to what I want? Do you think with the above considerations, that the Yoast SEO module is not worth the trouble? Thanks in advance, Humbly, Gerry0 -
SEO Campign Wont Synch up with facebook
Bonjour.... After enthusiastically telling a client we had a new offering where we could offer more insights into social media activity i enthusiatically dived into SEO Moz's social reporting tab with the ainm of synching the report to the clients facebook page. But after 20 mins of getting an error message it was clear I could not get SEO moz's socail media reporting tab to sunch up with http://www.facebook.com/#!/TennantsAuction or
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.facebook.com/TennantsAuction Here is a screen shot of my frustration:http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/cant-hook-in-facebook-seo-mozcopy.jpg I realise i have to have admin access to the facebook account which the client can give me but i need to know please is the feature broken or am i doing something wrong? Thanks in advance, David0 -
Any Insights On HTML5 Parallax Sites & SEO?
Looking for any insights regarding experience with optimization and HTML5 websites that use parallax scrolling making the website only one page (single unique URL). If done right, I've seen a number of these sites with great UX, clean design and nice layouts, but it comes down to only being able to optimize a single page. Does Google view single page sites as less authoritative? I'll open the floor to any comments at all about this. Thanks in advance Mozzers.
Technical SEO | | PHDL0 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Are there any SEO implications if a page does two 301s and then a 304?
Curious to see if this is a positive or negative thing for SEO...or even perhaps, neutral. h9SZz
Technical SEO | | RodrigoStockebrand0