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.
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 have just migrated a site to a new domain (with new design) and am redirecting from the old site to the new with .htaccess and redirect 301. Since the new site is quite different, I'm concerned that users might be disoriented. Is there a way to have a popup on the new site that users get only if they have been redirected from the old site? Have been searching on this but keywords seem to lead only to stuff on popup redirects to another site.
I can think of several ways to do it:
Redirect in the 301 to another page (www.blah.com/tour instead of www.blah.com) and there i would put the logic to show the popup
Redirect in the 301 to another page and there set a cookie and redirect to the original page. Then, add logic to the original page to show the popup if the cookie is present (and delete the cookie)
Check the referrer in the new site and if it matches the old one, show the popup
Your problem boils down to detecting a request that has come via a 301 redirect - popups and usability are a separate (simpler?!) issue.
Unfortunately, detecting a 301 redirect is one of those inexact things that requires a mixture of techniques to get near to 100%. I say near, but never quite there - a bit like browser detection.
One option is to append a querystring (GET) parameter to the redirected URL, e.g.
www.example.com/LandingPage.html?isRedirected=true
You could also set the same info in a cookie (but won't work if cookies are disabled or cleared).
Another option is checking the Referrer header - but again, these may differ based on browser implementation and can be faked, although if someone's faking a redirect I don't think you need to worry about guiding them through your new design!
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.
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.
We are migrating to a Sharepoint solution and our urls are changing slightly.
Are most RSS readers able to follow redirect links without breaking the feed and making an update manually?
Most of the documentation I'm reading says that this will work for major RSS readers.
I have read in some places that a lot of RSS readers will treat a 301 as a temporary redirect and not update its stored url. Any truth to this?
Assuming you are using a 301 redirect, I would say yes, since any reader worth its salt is built on a compliant HTTP library which will honor the 301 status code and follow the redirect.
Of course, it's not that hard to test with the reader of your choice.
Pretty much every RSS reader - major or minor - will update the feed URL when it encounters a 301 redirect.
In my (limited) experience, most applications will ignore the "permanent" part of a permanent redirect and execute the same logic they would use for a temporary redirect.
It may be necessary to make its site velindekserede about. What to do so to preserve PageRank, link popularity and traffic?
As I understand it, so the solution is called a 301 redirect. It tells search engines that the URL has been permanently moved. How a redirect should be done in a special way. At this link there are different options depending on what kind of server technology you use:
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
I just tried it in practice. I use PHP itself on all my sites, so I used the PHP instructions:
I ripped all my old page for tags and content and put the small code snippet on the page. Prisoners of the new URL for the page, and saved it. Tested the page by typing the old URL and then redirects worked. To be absolutely sure that redirects are search engine friendly, I used this "Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker":
http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php
There no disagreement about how well the 301-redirect is working and whether it can transfer an entire site to a new domain (http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_deve ... 135964.htm), but people's experience says that it is good enough. You just make sure that the new URL has the content as the old page had