I am currently working with a client to redevelop their website. One of the final things I need to do before launch, is to make sure that their old website's pages are correctly redirected to the new URL structure of the new website.
Unfortunately, when I check Google to see how their current site is indexed, this relatively small website appears to have over 1500 pages indexed.
When I look at the indexed links on Google, many appear to be duplicates of the same page, but because of the terrible URI structure used on the old website, Google treats them differently.
For example, the 'Map' page is indexed at least twice on Google, under the following 2 URLs:
www.website.com/frame_page-map.html?mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3&mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3?page_code=map&mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3&mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3
www.website.com/frame_page-map.html?mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7&mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7?page_code=map&mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7&mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7
Only the session name is different in the URL (and I have no idea why it is repeated four times in a single URL, either).
For reference, the replacement URL for this page is:
www.website.com/contact/map
My question is: How do I setup a redirect for these multiple records on Google? Do I simply set-up the redirect for the old URL minus all of the URI parameters (i.e. www.website.com/frame_page-map.html) or is there another better method to do this?
Thanks for any help you might be able to offer!
It depends on what your goals are. If you don't care about the querystrings then setup a 301 (permanent redirect) that points to just your root page - map.html. To prevent google from indexing querystring params as separate pages use the canonical tag and have it reference the parent. This isn't guaranteed to work, but google takes your canonical into consideration when indexing.
If you care about the querystring values then you will have to setup a redirect for each one. There is a querystring parameter that you can append to your redirects that will tell it to be ignored so you don't have to write a regex that detects it.
Related
I'm right now working on multiple websites from the same company each one connected to the others with a list of links on the top header.
The visits tracking is done with Google analytics and everything seems to be working fine. Too bad that they now seem to be unhappy with all the utm* parameters which get attached at the bottom of the url to obtain cross domain tracking.
For me the best solution seems to be this:
each url which links to another one of the sites is like 'www.somename.com/en' where 'en' is the desired language.
After clicking the new page opens with an url like 'www.somename.com/en?_utma=xxxxxxxx&_utmb=...'
If i remove from the links the language changing the href to 'www.somename.com' when the page loads,
the site makes a 301 redirect from 'www.somename.com/?_utma=xxxxxxxx&_utmb=...' to 'www.somename.com/en' where 'en' is the standard language, obtaining in this way exactly what the site owner desires.
Since i don't have access to the G anlaytics account i would like to ask if this might be the right solution or if we may be losing the cross domain tracking.
The cookie __utmz seems to contain the right referrer but I'm not sure if this can be considered enough to check if it is working.
But then i checked the other parameters here http://helpful.knobs-dials.com/index.php/Utma,_utmb,_utmz_cookies and it seems to me that all the other values on the cookies that we get after getting on the new domain don't have to be in any way related to the ones on the previous page (the site with the links).
What else should i check to be sure that everything is still working fine?
Thanks,
You will lose cross domain tracking (that is, even if you might salvage the traffic source the visitor session will be interrupted when changing the domain). One of the parameters added by the linker functions is a hash value (utmk) calculated from the various utm.. parameters. If the hash is missing or does not match the parameters cross domain tracking will be broken. You need to transfer the parameters to a javascript enabled page on the other domain so that the ga cookie can be updated - after that you can do 301 redirects at will.
If you want to avoid utm parameters you can
switch to universal analytics - requires a single parameter to be send; however you can't switch an GA acount to universal analytics, you would have to start from scratch (UPDATE: this is no longer true, you can and indeed should update existing properties)
try to get into the beta for the universal measurement protocol (which would even allow for javascript-less tracking - however you'd still need to send a single id from domain to domain)
So there is no real good solution for you. It is a lot better IMO to have some strange parameters in the url than to do a reload/redirect just to get rid of them.
My question is very simple: is there any way to (programmatically, technically, or manually) make a Google +1, Facebook Like, or Twitter Tweet This button preserve its count after a change of URI?
Programmatically: Doing something with the javascript to make it show the combined counts of two URIs while posting the new action to only the latter.
Technically: Do they detect and follow a 301 redirect from the original resource? Is there any special text I can include in the HTTP header to tell them that they should move all "points" from the old URI to the new one?
Manually: Some form somewhere on their site that I can submit or someone I can email that will be able to copy our points over to the new URI?
(note that I use URI and not URL in this question on purpose. The canonical resource link is changing from something.php?id=idnumber to /mycoolproduct/)
EDIT
Bounty started, but don't answer with "it can't be done"
I believe there is only one solution that fits your request above universally. That solution would be to 301/302 the old URIs to the new URIs and then keep using the old URIs with your social buttons. All the major social buttons allow you to specify the URL for which to like/g+/tweet/etc. This would preserve your existing social share counts and all shared posts would still direct to the same page. The choice now becomes whether to 301 or 302 redirect. A 302 may help preserve current search placement and avoid loosing your ranking if its pretty good. A 301 redirect (moved permanently) will cause search engines to start indexing your new URLs and dropping the old ones. This might cause a loss in current search rankings. It appears that as of this post, nobody is honoring redirects for social votes of any kind.
So I think the the safest route is to 302 redirect and continue to use the old URIs for social votes. You will keep your equity this way, but must maintain your redirects and become even more invested in the old URI template. How are your redirects implemented? .htaccess? or in page? You will need to weigh the cost-benefits for your case.
Otherwise you should probably 301 and start using the new URIs for your social buttons. In this case you might loose your social equity, but are free to build new without fear of messing up anything. If the social equity you are replacing can be recouped in say 6 months or less I wouldn't bother with it and start fresh.
However, this brings up an interesting point. You mentioned programatically adding two counts. Well yes, you could put together some JavaScript to add a couple counts together, but I gotta ask why? Adding them together for visual display purposes will not actually help increase referral traffic or search ranking. So its just a facade that I don't think helps you. If you're just looking to fool your visitors into thinking you're popular, why not just generate an image server side that keeps counting up. (bad joke, don't do it!) Bottom line you can't actually redirect your social equity, you may be able to pretend to have moved it, but you can't actually.
Considering your original question asks about several social buttons, its important to note that even if one or two of these services started honoring redirects when applying social votes, it wouldn't relieve you from making the decisions above. You'll still need the redirects for existing backlinks, and if you are supporting multiple social buttons on your page the choice of redirect type will need to be made with all of the social buttons in mind.
I can't speak for how to do this with Twitter/G+ but for Facebook:
You can't 'move' the likes and comments between URLs, and for new content you should definitely start using the new URLs, but for your existing URLs you can still have the original like counts/comments work if you:
Continue pointing the Like button on the new URL to the old URL (i.e <fb:like url="http://oldurl"/>
Add an exception to your redirect code so that when Facebook's crawler (facebookexternalhit/1.* - currently 1.1) accesses it, the original set of open graph meta tags are displayed (this will keep the description, title, thumbnail, etc, working as before)
Other users that land on the 'old' URL will still be redirected to the content in its new location
I have a real solution to this problem it might not be the most conventional but it does work 100%. Using a simple jQuery plugin called sharrre. Keep in mind I'm not the best jQuery coder (If you see improvements please let me know!) but this works regardless.
Here is how I did it on my site:
Using the sharrre plugin you can add the current share count to any element on your page. I simply got the data for both URLs then added them together and displayed them on the like, tweet, share, etc buttons.
This example is with Twitter but I'm doing this with Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and Linkedin. Here is the code:
<li id="twitter" data-url="CURRENT-URL" class="twitter sharrre"></li>
<li id="twitter-old" data-url="OLD-URL" class="twitter sharrre" style="display: none;"></li>
Then I called sharrre's code:
$(function(){ sharrreItUp(); }
This is how my function looks on my .js file:
function sharrreItUp() {
$('#twitter').sharrre({
share: {
twitter: true
},
enableHover: false,
click: function(api, options){
api.simulateClick();
api.openPopup('twitter');
}
});
$('#twitter-old').sharrre({
share: {
twitter: true
}
});
setTimeout(function(){
var oldTwts = $('#twitter-old .box .count').html();
var newTwts = $('#twitter .box .count').html();
$('#twitter .box .count').html(parseInt(oldTwts) + parseInt(newTwts));
}, 2000);
}
And BAM... you have your new URL being sharrred and the old shares from different social networks get added into them.
Unfortunately, there is no solution for this. We have tried all possible solutions and you will simply lose your social equity if you do a 301 Redirect. We found it to not be worth the hassle of trying to maintain our vote counts, and have instead pointed our buttons to the homepage in the interim of moving to the new url structure.
demo: http://so.devilmaycode.it/preserve-google-1-facebook-like-and-twitter-tweet-this-button-counts-after-ur/
i don't wanna say something wrong, but i think you just need to define the URI inside each share button, so no matter from what URL the vote come from, the defined url will be used as count.
if you, instead already have two different sources and you want to join it, you should follow the iframe src and scrape the count from it; for google +1 the div id that contain the count is #aggregateCount for twitter is #count; an example could be as below:
<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile('iframe-url-goes-here');
$count = $doc->getElementById('aggregateCount');
echo $count->nodeValue;
?>
then, on your page after the DOM is loaded and the widget are loaded, you can append your own value.
hope this help, in anycase i prefer the first way.
Put in the head of the new page
<meta property="og:url" content="old_url_here"/>
This way Facebook attributes likes for the old page. The only downside is that this way when people share your link, the old rich snippet will be included.
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.
Hey, so this is one of those questions that seems obvious, and I'm probably going to feel stupid, but here goes:
I'm doing a CodeIgniter site with a search. Think of a Google type input, where you'd search for "white huskies." I have a search results page that takes a URI (MySite.com/dogs/white huskies), and takes the third part, and performs the search on that term. I'd like this to be done in the URI, and no by POST so my users can bookmark results.
The problem I'm having is how to get that search button directed to Mysite.com/dogs/WHATEVER IS IN THE INPUT. How do I get the what is in the input part into the anchor href? I know I could do this with javascript, but I've heard it's bad practice to force people to have javascript for things this small.
Thanks for the help!
Read: Form redirect to URL containing query term? - pure HTML or Django
(asked for Django, but answer fits here too)
You could have an intermediate POST page that collects the form inputs and concatenates them into a valid URL which you can then redirect to. I'm not sure if this is good or bad SEO practice however, but I can't see another way of doing this without some Javascript intervention.
Perhaps you could look at doing the intermediate POST page which takes the values are redirects you to /search/dog/white/huskies, but also have a Javascript equivalent that does this on the fly on the form submit and does a window.location refresh to the same /search/dog/white/huskies?
Just my 2 pennies worth ;)
It is possible to have CodeIgniter work with $_GET variables and URI segments securely.
A work around I have used in the past is to have the search term collected using POST, parse the required URL for use with URI segments and then redirect your user to this page.
$url = 'mysite.com/search/' . urlencode($_POST['query']);
redirect($url);
This shouldn't effect SEO but something like the URL of a search result is unlikely to have any effect on SEO anyway. Clean URLs are only really meant to be used for permanent content. If you're going to be displaying the search term on the page, remember to use xss_clean(), seen a few people make this fatal mistake before.
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.