I wondered if someone could answer this question.
When putting in place 301 redirects for an old website to a new website. Would the metadata from the old website show on Google. If so, what is the best way to resole this?
How will our meta description, google preview and such like be impacted by the redirect? Meaning, will the current ones still show up once the redirect is in place, or will it be the meta description and google preview of the url it is being pointed to?
I guess that question applies to pretty much all of the current site settings/errors. Will we still be ranked on these and therefore is it in our interest to fix any errors with on the old site or should all the focus be on the destination domain, i.e. will any errors or settings on the referring domain no longer matter?
Related
I was asked to make a website for a restaurant that recently changed owners. They wanted a new URL. The owner of the old site enacted a redirect to the new site.
Old site: http://www.refugelounge.com
New site: http://www.therefugeyc.com
I don't know a lot about redirects but I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever it is going on here is hurting the new site's pagerank and traffic. The old URL comes up first in Google and shows up as an exact clone of the new site. And when visiting the old site, the URL remains static no matter what page is visited.
What's going on here? Thanks.
Yep, that's bad.
They use frames (frameset + frame). Despite being obsolete ("must not be used by authors"), frames are bad for usability (it's not possible for users to link to a specific page).
They should use a HTTP 301 redirect.
I recently purchased the domain www.iacro.dk from UnoEuro and installed WordPress planning to integrate blogging with Facebook. However, I cannot even get to share a link to the domain.
When I try to share any link on my timeline, it gives the error "The content you're trying to share includes a link that's been blocked for being spammy or unsafe: iacro.dk". Searching, I came across Sucuri SiteCheck which showed that McAfee TrustedSource had marked the site as having malicious content. Strange considering that I just bought it, it contains nothing but WordPress and I can't find any previous history of ownership. But I got McAfee to reclassify it and it now shows up green at SiteCheck. However, now a few days later, Facebook still blocks it. Clicking the "let us know" link in the FB block dialog got me to a "Blocked from Adding Content" form that I submitted, but this just triggered a confirmation mail stating that individual issues are not processed.
I then noticed the same behavior as here and here: When I type in any iacro.dk link on my Timeline it generates a blank preview with "(No Title)". It doesn't matter if it's the front page, a htm document or even an image - nothing is returned. So I tried the debugger which returns the very generic "Error Parsing URL: Error parsing input URL, no data was scraped.". Searching on this site, a lot of people suggest that missing "og:" tags might cause no scraping. I installed a WP plugin for that and verified tag generation, but nothing changed. And since FB can't even scrape plain htm / jpg from the domain, I assume tags can be ruled out.
Here someone suggests 301 Redirects being a problem, but I haven't set up redirection - I don't even have a .htaccess file.
So, my questions are: Is this all because of the domain being marked as "spammy"? If so, how can I get the FB ban lifted? However, I have seen examples of other "spammy" sites where the preview is being generated just fine, e.g. http://dagbok.nu described in this question. So if the blacklist is not the only problem, what else is wrong?
This is driving me nuts so thanks a lot in advance!
I don't know the details, but it is a problem that facebook has with web sites hosted on shared servers, i.e. the server hosting your web site also hosts a number of other web sites.
I've been at this for almost 3 days straight and now I can't even think clearly anymore.
All I'm trying to do is to get my featured image thumbnail to appear when I paste the link in Facebook.
I'm using the Wordpress Facebook Open Graph protocol plugin which generates all the correct og meta properties.
My thumbnail images are 240x200px which respects the minimum requirements and also respects the 3:1 ratio
I've made sure there's no trailing slash at the end of my post URLs
When I use the Facebook Object Debugger, the only warning is in regards to my locale, but that shouldn't affect it.
Facebook appears to be pulling the right image, at least the URL is correct, but the image appears as a blank square
I've gone through pretty much every thread I could find in forums, but all the information available is about using the correct og tags, which I believe I'm already doing.
Thank you very very much for any help, I'm desperate!! :)
You can troubleshoot the OpenGraph meta tags with the Debugger https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug - this can at least show if you're using the meta tags properly and if Facebook can 'read' the image.
I finally figured out that the root of my issue was the fact that I was using an addon domain (which is really a subdomain being redirected to the top level domain) and I read on eHow (of all places :) ) that Facebook has trouble pulling data from redirected domains.
Not sure if there was another way around it, but I simply ended up creating a seperate hosting account and everything is loading properly now.
one problem youre going to run into testing is that often the first time your page or post gets liked, fb keeps whatever img it finds in your meta tags or by searching your page. so, you'll keep changing your img meta tag and still it wont show the right pic. it's very anoying. One way to get around it is to change the slug of your post. now, it has a different url and to fb, it's a different page. The downside is you lose all the likes that go with your orig url. Not a problem with a new site.
I ended here googling another problem. Maybe this might help someone:
Please bear in mind that the facebook scraper works asynchronously and will need some time (during my tests around 10 minutes) to be able to display an image after seeing it for the first time.
For more information, here's a more thorough answer on a similar problem.
Indeed, as Andy Wibbels points out the FB debugger is a really handy tool.
I faced a similar issue with a server's og:image tag pointing to a secure subdomain which actually mirrors a CDN server,
<meta property="og:image" content="https://subdomain.pathToImage.jpg" />
<meta property="og:image_secure" content="https://subdomain.pathToImage.jpg" />
The FB debugging tool allows you to see the errors that FB encounters when trying to pull the image.
In my case the subdomain was not registered under the SSL certificate used by the HTTPS protocol. Hence FB was getting the following error,
Curl Error : SSL_CACERT SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate
I have seen multiple articles on redirecting Urls when the site has been redesigned or Url just changed to a standard format but I need to know how to manage when the Url has no correlation to the old one.
For instance, an old Url may have been www.mysite.com/index.php?product=12 but there is no way to map that Url to the new site.
I don't want search engines to think that the page has broken so I assume the best thing to do is to 301 redirect to the home page but I am not sure how I would do that effectively. Would I just change the 404 error page to do a 301 to the home page?
Also, would that then cause issues with duplicate content via dofferent Urls?
Is it better to just not worry about these and let the search engines re-index the new Urls?
I am running IIS7 with Rewrite module and ASP.NET 2.
Thanks.
Why do you say there is no way to map that URL to the new one? There probably is, since both should be unique identifiers for a given resource. If your site has good rankings, it may be worth the pain to work this out and have a 301 redirect to the right page. In this way, the ranks should be unchanged.
Redirecting everything to the new home page will probably have a negative effect. It really depends on how the bots are going to interpret this. But it may seem an artificial way to increase the rank of the home page, and correspondingly get a penalty.
Doing nothing and waiting for the bots to index your new site will of course work, but often you cannot afford to lose the high rank you have gained.
All in all, I would advise you to ask here a new question on how to map the old URLs to the new ones, and do proper redirects.
That product URL you supplied is obviously, well, a product. The best bet is to 301 redirect it to a new page that is the most relevant to that old page. If there aren't any external links even pointing to it at all, just let it die. Be sure to remove it from any sitemaps or old navigation links you may have internally though or it will keep getting re-indexed which is what you want to avoid.
Once you have your new site structure set up, visit a site like AuditMyPc.com and create a brand new sitemap of your new site setup. Then login to Google Webmaster Tools and resubmit the new sitemap. This normally will fix the problem, but if that page is indexed, expect it to stay in Google's index for a while. They don't clean themselves up too well.
Apologies if SO is not the right place for this, but there are 700+ other SEO questions on here.
I'm a senior developer for a travel site with 12k+ pages. We completely redeveloped the site and relaunched in January, and with the volatile nature of travel, there are many pages which are no longer on the site. Examples:
/destinations/africa/senegal.aspx
/destinations/africa/features.aspx
Of course, we have a 404 page in place (and it's a hard 404 page rather than a 30x redirect to a 404).
Our SEO advisor has asked us to 30x redirect all our 404 pages (as found in Webmaster Tools), his argument being that 404's are damaging to our pagerank. He'd want us to redirect our Senegal and features pages above to the Africa page (which doesn't contain the content previously found on Senegal.aspx or features.aspx).
An equivalent for SO would be taking a url for a removed question and redirecting it to /questions rather than showing a 404 'Question/Page not found'.
My argument is that, as these pages are no longer on the site, 404 is the correct status to return. I'd also argue that redirecting these to less relevant pages could damage our SEO (due to duplicate content perhaps)? It's also very time consuming redirecting all 404's when our site takes some content from our in-house system, which adds/removes content at will.
Thanks for any advice,
Adam
The correct status to return is 410 Gone. I wouldn't want to speculate about what search engines will do if they are redirected to a page with entirely different content.
As I know 404 is quite bad for SEO because your site won't get any PageRank for pages linked from somewhere but missing.
I would added another page, which will explain that due to redesign original pages are not available, offering links to some other most relevant pages. (e.g. to Africa and FAQ) Then this page sounds like a good 301 answer for those pages.
This is actually a good idea.
As described at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
(which is a good resource for the non seo people here)
404 is obviously not good. A 301 tells spiders/users that this is a permanent redirect of a source. The content should not get flagged as duplicate because you are not sending a 200 (good page) response and so there is nothing spidered/compared.
This IS kinda a grey hat tactic though so be careful, it would be much better to put actual 301 pages in place where it is looking for the page and also to find who posted the erroneous link and if possible, correct it.
I agree that 404 is the correct status, but than again you should take a step back and answer the following questions:
Do these old pages have any inbound links?
Did these old pages have any good, relevant content to the page you are 301'ing it to?
Is there any active traffic that is trying to reach these pages?
While the pages may not exist I would investigate the pages in question with those 3 questions, because you can steer incoming traffic and page rank to other existing pages that either need the PR/traffic or to pages that are already high traffic.
With regards to your in house SEO saying you are losing PR this can be true of those pages have inbound links, because you they will be met with a 404 status code and will not pass link juice, since nothing exists there any more. That's why 301's rock.
404s should not affect overall pagerank of other web pages of a website.
If they are really gone then 404/410 is appropriate. Check the official google webmasters blog.