On a site we have a tag system. Recently we discovered that we have to rename most of the tags and redirect them. It looks like a job for 301 redirect, however some of the tags will be renamed incorrectly (because the process is automatic) and we will return them to their original name at a later time. When that happens we will need to do a redirect back to the original url and probably do a 301 again. Obviously at one time only one of the urls would do a 301 and all of this would happen within the same domain.
For example, we start with www.example.com/tag/foo.
Then the automatic name correction would change it to www.example.com/tag/bar and do a 301 from the previous address.
The automatic correction would be ok for most tags, but not this one, so we would eventually fix the url back to www.example.com/tag/foo and do a 301 yet again.
I tested it (using a site running locally) in Firefox 50 and Chrome 54 and both seem to handle the situation fine (when I redirect to the original address the browser forgets the old 301). Does google (and/or other browsers) also figure this out or am I better of doing 302 and hoping that google changes the address in the index rather than duplicate the pages?
You're using 301 Moved Permanently for what you admit in the comments is a 307 Temporary Redirect. So yes, that causes problems.
Related
I am currently redirecting a website to another new website. My question is does a redirect automatically move my metadata (titles, taglines, meta description, focus keyphrases) to the new site? or Do I have to manually copy and paste metadata to the new site?
Better put - do my rankings from the old site as a result of metadata automatically point to my new site upon redirecting?
Thanks.
You are going to want to look into using a specific kind of redirect, which is the HTTP 301 redirect. That status code means its a permanent redirect, and most search engines will recognize that and will help keep your SEO.
If you do a HTTP 302 redirect, this being known as a temporary redirect, will technically be considered a new URL in the eyes of a search engine.
So when you are testing you redirect, make sure you open up Chrome Dev Tools (F12) and click the network tab. Refresh the page and click the first row that appears in the table. It should specify the HTTP status code, most likely being 200 (status ok), (301/302) permanent/temporary redirect, (404) file not found, 500 (server error).
So essentially, make sure your redirect is using a 301 redirect, if it is permanent of course!
I migrated my site 2 years back (flash based to responsive). But Google crawler still complains that the old files are not reachable. Few times, I marked them fixed in the webmaster tools site. But still producing those errors. Some one mentioned in Google forum, just leave them as errors for a while and crawler marks itself these as obsolete after few attempts. This approach is also not helping. The site is a *nix GoDaddy-site with .htaccess file. Any ideas?
I think it will work if you set up an http re-write rule for your web server, defining the content as http 301, Moved Permanently. Then the crawl bot will start looking in the new place.
So, the bot request:
GET /index.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
And the appropriate server response:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.example.org/index.asp
I've done this with success before, on a forum site where we changed URL format after a year or so.
If the amount of links are not too big, you can redirect each and one of them by doing this in .htaccess:
Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://example.com/new-page.html
Redirect 301 /another-old-page.html http://example.com/another-new-page.html
And it seems that the mod_rewrite is enabled by default, so only type your redirects, and you're home free. When you've had them for a while, they can be taken away again.
I made an error in structuring my clients site such that I unnecessarily added a path that was not needed.
What I did was this:
www.mysite.com/vehicles/ford
www.mysite.com/vehicles/ford/fusion
I have since modified the site such that it now reads -
www.mysite.com/ford/
www.mysite.com/ford/fusion/
Needless to say that Google is now reporting well over 1600 bad urls, ie. 404.
I am using Godaddy shared hosting IIS, the site is done in classic ASP.
I have the web.config file figured out for the url rewrites on the second generation but am hoping to get some help with the 301 redirect. I hope I don't need 1600 redirects, but rather some code that takes anything with /vehicles/ (and after) and redirects to another page, say the home page.
Here is what I have tried but it just takes me to /vehicles/acura/
We've just put a new website live and I have varying Url re-writing in place to handle the old indexed pages, performing a 301 redirect to the new equivalent page location on the new site.
We've noticed since the day the new site went live that in Google Analytics, the stats in general have plummeted substantially :(
One of our SEO guys has pointed out that when you click on one of the old indexed pages in google, it correctly 301's to the new location, however, if you view the __utmz Google Analytics cookie, it has 'direct' in it, whereas he believes that should be 'organic'.
He thinks that the referrer information is being lost during the 301 redirect, and as a result, this is being treated as direct traffic instead of organic?
The new website is an ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms application and is using Routing for the new Url's. I am generating the new route/url for old pages within the global.asax within the Application_BeginRequest routine.
If a 301 is needed for the request, this is the code that is executed:
Response.Clear();
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location", newUrl);
Response.End();
Is there anything here that would indicate what the problem might be, or any ideas beyond the above what might be causing such an issue?
I located the problem - a silly error on my part with a relative url to a file that accompanies our google analytics tag, working in some locations of the website, but in others, the include was returning a 404! My bad.
I've got half a dozen legacy dynamic URLs and it turns out redirecting them all will require 18 Rewrite directives in my .htaccess file - that seems messy to me.
What I can do however, is redirect all of them to my new start page with a single Redirect directive. It's a tiny site and all the pages people might come in from via google searches are really easily findable from the start page so I'd like to do that however...
I'm worried this might kill the site's modest (but worth maintaining) page rank as several URLs would then be resolving to the same URL and content.
Does anyone know if this would be the case, and if so, if there are strategies to avoid that other then not implementing the above?
Thanks!
Roger.
As long as you do 301 Redirects (permanently moved) vs 302 Redirects (temporarily moved), then all the accumulated page rank from your dozen legacy URLs will transfer to the new url you are redirecting to.
So you will not "lose" the pagerank, it will simply be transfered over to the new URL.
The important thing is to ensure it's a 301 Redirect.