Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site have around nearly 20,000 pages, and I did 301 redirect around 2 months ago, no pagerank and links transfer to the new url yet. So now only the home page that has Page rank.
I noticed that since last Wednesday 1 November, my referral has dropped 50% and also some page has gone from Google database.
I don't know if this is the result of the 301 redirect or something. Will Google think that 301 redirect heaps of pages at a time is a spam?
Any explanation would be very appreciated.
Thanks in advance
301 redirect from the old url to the new one from page to page for the whole site except the Home Page.
It would probably be better to do the 301 from www.domain1.com to www.domain2.com
1. Have you checked that the 301 is working properly?
2. Have you contacted the people who linked to you, asking them to update?
3. Have you got new links (eg Quality Directory listings) for the new URL?
4. Did you make significant changes to content, filenames, folder names or other naviagtional issues at the time of the 301 or soon after?
Think about them. But remember that in this context, page rank DOES NOT MATTER - it is always several moths out of date, and so cannot reflect the changes.
What matters is page ranking (does the new url do as well as the old in your keyword searches); visitor numbers, conversions and ROI.
1. Yes, I checked and 301 redirect is working fine.
2. No, I haven't contact people to update the link to me yet. I thought the link will be transfer to the new url when I give 301 redirect.
3. Yes, but most of new link goes to my home page because most of the directory allow me to submit just only the home page.
4. Yes, I did change and add some content to each page to give more infomation about each product before 301 the old url to the new one.
my old url look like this:
www.mysite.com/keyword/1234.htm
but i changed to:
www.mysite.com/category1/category2/mykeyword.html
My new content is very unique, I cannot find any copy stolen when I checked on Copyscape.
What I'm afraid of at the moment is when Google see my site 301 redirect to the new url around 10,000 url at the same time, Google will think this is some sneaky spam or something. But it is not spam, I redirect it just because to improve my site, no intention to spam at all.
Maybe try a search for moving domains site:webmasterworld.com on your favorite SE.
I have read often domain moves are counted as 'new' domains, even when redirecting an old site.
Justin
While you will get 'lost people' with the 301, you will not transfer any 'Google benefit', as you have changed the structure and content; you are not transferring 'like for like', but are tranferring from old to new. And new pages/sites will always be subject to a delay before full benefit.
301s work best when they are domain to domain, and nothing changes. So visitors go from www.domain1/folder1/filename.htm to www.domain2/folder1/filename.htm, where filename.htm has NOT substantially changed. Every deviation from that level of simplicity risks reducing the benefit of the 301.
The number of pages being redirected is not a problem. 301 is a permanent redirect. provided the pages are permanently moved (IE removed from the old site and placed on the new), then Google will not 'suspect' anything; there's nothing to suspect!
[edited by: Quadrille at 10:45 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]
I also agree with "Quadrille"
[edited by: Manpasand at 11:15 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]
