Very Puzzled --- 301 ReDirects Did Not Work - Lost Rankings - Any Thoughts?
-
This one has us stumped and frustrated, hopefully someone out there in SEOMoz land can give us some thoughts and/or suggestions on what's going on and how to remedy.
This is a follow-up to a post I made awhile back. Here is an excerpt from the original post --
We currently have 3 different versions of our State Business-for-Sale listings pages - the versions are:
Version 1 -- Preferred Version (Links on Homepage www.businessbroker.net)
http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Vermont-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
Title = Vermont Business for Sale Ads - Vermont Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker (I realize the title needs work)
Version 2: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/blistings.ihtml)
URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-Vermont.aspx
Title = Vermont Business for Sale | 120 Vermont Businesses for Sale | BusinessBroker.net
Version 3: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/businessesforsale.ihtml)
URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_vermont.ihtml
Title = Vermont Businesses for Sale at BusinessBroker.net - Vermont Business for Sale
While the page titles and meta data are a bit different, the bulk of the page content (which is the listings rendered) are identical.
OK, so we decided to test this on 5 of our State pages - I will use VERMONT in this discussion. We did 301 ReDirects on Version 2 and Version 3 -- they now redirect to Version 1 - we did the redirects and also changed the URL's on the pages. Prior to the change, we were ranking for keywords like "Vermont Business for Sale" and some other similar keywords -- on 1st page of Google --- now, we have lost our rankings big time.
Did we do something wrong? I thought when you did 301's the majority of link juice was supposed to be preserved (losing 10% or so) -- this didn't happen in our case.
Any help on what we can do would be appreciated. We only did 5 States as a test and also noticed big drops for Maine as well. These were both states where VERSION 2 was the page that was showing up in SERPs.
Thanks in advance for wading through this long post and any help you can provide!!
- Matt
-
I ran your new domain - the one that you redirect the others to - through OSE and there were 58 incoming links but they were from only 2 different root domains. One of them no longer linked to you when I checked it and the other one was blocked by our security software here at work. The software stated that it was a 'Verified Threat'. If the site linking to you is malicious and there are multiple links from that site to your domain Google could be penalizing you for it - once all of the link juice (well, all that WILL pass) is passed via your 301s then this should tip the ratio of good/bad links in to your favor and hopefully fix the issue. It may be a good idea to look in to the site though. It could be nothing, our software has been known to block pages that are fine although it is pretty rare... the page that is linking to your page is http://www.onlinebizdirectory.com/business/businesses_for_sale_in_vermont.html
-
not sure I follow this....can you provide a bit more detail? we did not change anything on the link front. thanks
-
The page you redirect to has 58 links from two root domains. One seems not to link to you any more and the other is blocked by Trend Micro here at work calling it a verified threat.... that may be worth looking in to while you wait for the link juice to pass....
-
Doh - I right clicked and copied URLs - I didnt notice - LOL, sorry about that
-
Hi Billy - We did not redirect the California URLs. Maine and Vermont were redirected. Thanks, MM
-
Got the same error for http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_california.ihtml
-
I dont know if this is the best tool (just found it using Google) but I used http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php/ and checked http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx and got this:
Either http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx is NOT REDIRECTING to any URL or the redirect is NOT SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY
-
It sounds that you did things correctly (especially testing a few pages first). Here are a couple of things for your consideration:
Google Takes Time on 301 Redirects
When I did a change of URLs on a site with about 200 pages last month. The rankings and traffic tanked for two weeks, then reappeared. It may be taking time for Google to move the value of your version 2 pages to the value of your version 1 page. You will just have to wait and see.
Duplicate Content Can be Addressed this Way:
If you have three same-content pages, you can keep them all and put a canonical tag on all three that reference version one as the prefered copy.
-
The 301 Redirects were done on 6/21/12 -- so about 6 weeks ago. No other changes to the pages were made.
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
-
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
What happens to 301 redirect if the site taken down?
I understand 301 redirect carries over the page value to the page its being redirected to. However what happens if for example, I do a 301 redirect from example.com to example.co.uk, 2 months later I take down hosting and cancel domain for example.com, would I lose the page value that was being carried over to example.co.uk? Do I need to keep both domains active?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marvellous0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
301 redirect to multiple domain
Hi guys, I have a domain A, B and C. The domain A was an association of two business and they are about to split. Parts of domain A are going to be redirect to domain B, but some content belong to the domain C. So my question : Is it possible to 301 redirect some pages from A to B and some other pages from A to C and if yes, what would be the impact on SEO ? Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevePatenaude0 -
How does Google treat chained 301 redirects?
I did the following two chained 301 redirects (A->B->C) Plural to Singular to New Domain A. http://domain1.com/filenames B. http://domain1.com/filename C. http://domain2.com/filename To new domain without www and then back to origining domain A. http://www.domain1.com/filename B. http://domain2.com/filename C. http://domain1.com/fifilename How much link juicy will be rediectetoto URL C in above two scenarios?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
What is the Proper Use of 301 redirects for SEO purposes?
I heard and read from different sources that 301 redirects from aged domains with healthy link profiles is great to boost a sites rank as oppose to building a site around the page and linking it to the domain you want to rank. Whats is the best practice for this strategy? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0 -
Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?
Hey Mozers, I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers. I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out. Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0