Baidu and 301 rediects

[Vimes]

Hi,

some time ago we had a site navigation change on my website, so with the huge amount of URL's that were changed i decided to advise the Bots of the new URL destination with 301 directs.

admittedly there where a large amount of these applied across many levels of the server, this was basically for the other search engines and Baidu i didn't really think about.

i've just been going through my SERP's on baidu which used to be fairly good across the website and I'm seeing massive holes in the rankings.

what does rank are pages with the old URL structure rather than the new, does any one have any previous history with how Baidu takes a large URL restructuring of a website using 301 redirects.

the spider still visits my site but the freshness of the cache dates and the depth of indexing makes it appear as I've been penalised in their SERP's.

any one got any idea's?

Vimes.

[bill]

I've made some site changes and 301 redirected pages on Chinese sites in the past. It does take Baidu longer than Google for the SERPs to reflect the change, but eventually it will take. How long ago did you make these changes?

[Vimes]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the reply, i made these changes a long time ago, we are talking almost 12 months.

one thing that i am seeing in Baidu's results is the that the smaller size pages are visited and cached, where the pages that are larger than Baidu's 125 caching restriction don't seem to be hit that frequently. Is that a factor? I do have a large amount of info and functionality on my pages, which the other engines love.

looking at my log files though I'm seeing the spider hit the redirected URL's but not index the new file structure. 12 months just seems way toooooo long to me.

Vimes.

[bill]

12 months does seem a bit long to me as well. I thought you were talking about something much more recent.

How much of your old URL structure did you nuke? How much is left from the old structure?

[Vimes]

How much of your old URL structure did you nuke?

in percentage terms about 20-25% of my pages, we amalgamated the thin content pages.

How much is left from the old structure?

well looking at the page totals I'm not seeing the a large amount of these left.

but it appears that the Bot is just confused with the redirect as the old redirected URL's are disappearing but the landing URL's aren't ranking, so does Baidu see me as a redirect spammer?

I've checked the redirects time and time again just to make sure i haven't inadvertently sent them in a loop, but i would have seen that with the other engines a long time ago.

Vimes.

[mademetop]

There really should be no problems with 301s on Baidu. Done them many times - but as Bill pointed out they can be slow. What is happening to you does sound strange.

Can you sticky mail me your URL? I may be able to investigate further.

[Vimes]

Hi,

a little update

i've just done some further research on the pages that Baidu thinks i have.

I'm seeing canonical URL's every where even tho i stopped that problem in 2005 :)

i've just rechecked all the redirects again and there isn't from what i'm seeing any issue the rewrite its doing what it say's on the tin.

hmmm maybe the restructuring was to large for Baidu to "trust" me again.

Baiduspider hits me hard across my Chinese pages as well as the other languages, but it does seem very selective to what it thinks is worth caching and ranking.

Vimes.

[Vimes]

hmmm,

Baidu I'm sooooo glad i don't have to rely on your robot :)
looks like I'm gunna have to wait a couple of months for your extremely "simple" robot to get it together.

Vimes.

[Vimes]

Right just completed submitting every single canonical URL manually to Baidu's add url page, and i'll let that sit there for a couple of months to see it is makes a difference, which i doubt it will but makes me feel better any way :p

Vimes.

[bill]

Thanks for keeping us posted of this. I haven't posted anything because I haven't had much to add, but I am checking in. I'm sure others are as well.