Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Oh, it's solved.

I forgot to say that we have switched hosting provider. From some reason it renamed our mu_plugins folder to mu_plugins_old. I have simply renamed the folded and reactivated cashing plugin, which creates the rule and writes in htaccess.

Thanks Andy for your contrubution. The links you share are useful for anyone looking for the right way of doing 301 redirections.

Cheers!

Dear mozers,

Thank you for your time reading the message and wanting to help!

So, we have moved our WordPress to https and redirected all the content successfully via htaccess file.

We used a simple 301 redirect plugin, which we are using to redirect old URLs to the new ones.

The problem today is, the redirections in the plugin are not working for http version. Here is an example:

htaccess redirect:

http --> https

Plugin redirect

domain.com/old --> domain.com/new

but, the url http://domain.com/old is not redirecting to https://domain.com/new

while

https://domain.com/old does redirects to https://domain.com/new

What can you suggest as a solution?

Thank you in advance!

P.S. I don't think having 2 redirects for each version of the URL is the smartest solution

Best wishes,

Dusan

Thanks Dirk. I will read the article.

Hi,

Does anyone have experience moving a website to https?

I am about to do so. I have 84 linking root domains and around 2k+ external links. If i move a website to https will these links be lost? And how to keep these links?

Many thanks,

Dusan

Hi Kevin,

Thank you very much for help. I have sent you an email.

Regards, Dusan

Why would you create landing page if you are already ranking high for the certain keyword? Usually home pages have the most backlinks and are most likely to rank highest. I would recommend you to re-design you home page with certain call-to-action button. Maybe a good slider in top would do the job. Hope it helps...

Dusan

Thanks Dirk, i'm on my way home right now. Will do what you recommend later today, and will let you know how it goes.

Cheers

Hi,

There is no right and wrong answer on your question.

I would definitely recommended to use brand name in meta tittles for brand recognition. If potential visitors start seeing your brand name in search results, than see it somewhere across social networks or PPC ads, there is high possibility for them to remember your brand and eventually click to see what is it all about.

Ofcourse you should concentrate more on relevant keywords, but if you have enough space i don't see a reason not to include it on the end of a string. If your brand is well known or stand for quality, than including the brand name in meta tittle adds value to your search snippet. But, if it is not well known, you are on a good track for it to become well known

f.x  Black leather jackets for woman | Brand Name

Regards,

Dusan

• meaning if you sell pencils and your brand name is XYZ

Dirk, thank you for the reply.

I did check the URL via web-sniffer, the http status is 301 moved permanently**.**

Why is it than that MOZ sees it as 404, i don't understand? Also how can I retrieve the value from those backlinks?

Thanks, Dusan

Dear  MOZers,

I have one concern i would like to ask you..

My website have valuable backlinks to the most important page which is awesome. But, some of those backlinks is old URL which is 301 redirected to the URL I use today. As far as i know 301 redirects pass page rank, so it should be alright. (?)

Link i use today: domain.com/awesome-url/

My backlink: domain.com/old-boring-url/    301 redirected to  domain.com/awesome-url/

What bothers me is that in MOZ report (Link opportunities) MOZ indicates my important URL (domain.com/old-boring-url/) return 404. But, it is not true. It is 301 redirected to domain.com/awesome-url/ and it works! I am worried i am losing important link juice here(!?)

Also, my On Page Grader tool for domain.com/awesome-url/ reports 0 backlinks. And that is not true! I know exactly which websites are linking back, only problem is that those website are using old URL (domain.com/old-boring-url/) to link back to my website.

Am i doing something wrong? Is there a better way to redirect and save valuable link juice for my page?

Thank you very much!

PS

The URL was changed in March 2015.

Thank you for your time Egol. According to Moz our website is outranking my competitor's website in all other metrics other than total external links. Hope we will outrank them on google as well

And thank you Josh and Highland for sharing your thoughts, it was really helpful.

Thank you for the respond Egol,

Right, but original .com version is not deindexed (!?) and that is the issue at the first place. They are manufacturing links and it works for a long time now. Their .com website still ranks high.

As you have said 'Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time' - killing ONE of those pages or sites is not sufficient enough. What about the original page/site which still ranks? Nobody cares for their duplicate websites being deindexed.

Than you have said 'In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.' - well, the one website which ranks is all they need :). If 'sometimes' will be damaged, than it still means that it is OK to manufacture links by duplicating website, and take the risk to 'maybe' become deindexed.

Theoretically every website owner can create duplicate websites and manufacture tons of back links. It makes the white hat link building pointless. If you ask me this is very much violating google's policy and they should be reported. Otherwise, why don't all of us do the same!?

It is irritating to see someone acting spammy getting better rankings...

Hi Mozers,

After investigating our no 1 competitor we have discovered their 87k back links comparing to ours 1k. After dipper investigations we discovered that all the back links are gained by the websites created by themselves.

So what they did is - they had purchased 10+ domains and created 10+ new websites that are identical as their original .com version. EVERY SINGLE LINK on these 'new' websites link to their .com version. The 'New' websites are not indexed.

Literally each of us can do the same and gain thousands of back links, but isn't it violating google's policy?

What are your thought on it?

(What is the best practice to report the violation of google's policy to Google?)

Best regards,

Lana

Thank you Clever PhD, really valuable insights!

I see the point. Thanks Liam. As the most of our 404 pages starts with /en-GB/ i will do like this:

Disallow: /en-GB/

Thank you for reading.

After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain).

It would be nonsense to 301 redirect them as there are to many URLs. (or would it be nonsense?)

What is the best way to deal with this issue?

But, what is your experience, should i expect my 'end of the chain' to return back on search results? Or is it better strategy to go for another page to rank, in this case <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://chemometec.com/journal/nucleocounter-nc-200-the-most-precise-cell-counter/?</a>

'Inspect element' - sorry for asking and thank you very much for the help.

If I may ask how you are able to see which URLs have canonical links on my site? Which tool are you using?

Hi Dimitri,

Thanks again for taking time to help.

'The end of the chain' is http://chemometec.com/cell-counters/cell-counter-nc-200-nucleocounter/

And that is the only page that should rank. I have changed it so that other two links are canonically pointing to the 'end of the chain'. The confusion was because the 'end of chain' after being #11 has disappeared from SERP, which i don't understand why. Maybe keyword stuffing(!?) - i will try to reduce keywords ('cell counter') on the page.

Should continue to keep 'end of the chain' as it is and hope it will come back to SERP or should i use different strategy and use the landing page <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://chemometec.com/journal/nucleocounter-nc-200-the-most-precise-cell-counter/</a> as the 'end of the chain' which is currently ranked high?

I still don't understand how it is possible that i have pages canonically linking to itself (!?) I havn't done it. Can it be possible that Yoast SEO is doing that?

Thanks in advance. You are really helping here.

Hello Dmitri,

Thank you very much for detailed review on my issue, i appreciate it a lot.

How do you mean all pages have canonical links to itself? It is the first time i hear that a link have a canonical to itself (!?) I am using Yoast SEO plugin, that is how i manage my canonical links. Only canonical links i have are manually added pointing to the URLs i want to rank.

Thank you!

Hi,

I have two URL both talking about keyword phrase 'counting aggregated cells'

The first URL has canonical link pointing to the second URL, but if one searches for 'counting aggregated cells' both URLs are shown in the results.

The first URL is the pdf, and i need only second URL (the landing page) to be shown in the search results.

The canonical links should tell Google which URL to index, i don't understand why both URLs are present in search results? Is 'noindex' for the first URL only solution?

I am using Yoast SEO for my website.

Thank you for the answers.

Hey folks,

A URL on my webpage that has been climbing in search results ever since has suddenly completely disapeared from the search results and i'm absolutely stuck - no idea what the reason might be.

It was ranked #11 for the targeted keyword, than it slightly started dropping down to #14 and #17 after which it completely disappeared, not only for specific targeted keyword, but also for exact name of the product. The URL has vanished from search results.

I looked in search console, no particular errors or messages from Google.

The only case I might come with is that many URLs are cannonicaly linked to the URL in matter, but i don't assume this might be the case.

Does anyone have a suggestion what might the reason why the URL has completely vanished from the search results? Thank you a lot.

The URL:  http://chemometec.com/cell-counters/cell-counter-nc-200-nucleocounter/

Targeted keyword: 'cell counter'

Thank you again Monica. The reviews are definitely be implemented. Good luck!

Thank you Monica, really good answer!

Now, with copyscape.com what is the percentage of uniqueness that is 'allright'?

We are selling laboratory products for cell analysis, tittles and descriptions of our products are highly scientific. Manufacturer is the only one who can write it. Re-writing is our only option.

However, i am not that scared of being penalies any more. Thank you very much!

Hi,

My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop.

Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it.

With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I  am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content.

If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)?

What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content?

Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us.

Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers,

Cheers,

Dusan

Thank you! It was helpful..

Hi,

I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice?

Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too.

Dusan