Recent 301 redirects have left me with no PageRank?

[bleached]

I recently had a site revamp and used 301 redirects in the site migration as some URLīs had to be optimised.

A week later my new URLīs have been indexed by google, however the PR has not been pasted to the new URLīs. Iīm a little worried as all 301 redirects are properly implemented and I have lost many pages with PR5+. Does anyone know what is happening, will the PR be passed at a later on?

[tedster]

The PR that is shown on the toolbar is usually only updated about four times a year. However, Google does update their "real" PR values on a continual basis behind the scenes, and those "not visible" PR values are used to calcaulate rankings, not the values on the toolbar.

[bleached]

Thank you Tedster for your feedback.

My site targets several languages and for example I have changed this .com/spanish to .com/espanol, if all my inbound links are coming to the old .com/spanish does that mean I will loose all link juice (301 redirects are in place)? Iīm not sure if to notify "The decent directories" of the URL change or not.

[tedster]

If your redirect /spanish/ to /espanol/ you will preserve PageRank and anchor text influence.

[bleached]

After 2 weeks of implementing the migration the .com/espanol/ PR was on N/A, just this week (4 weeks after the migration) the original PR5 has gone to PR0.

I really donīt know what has happened. Is this all part of the process? Will the PR slowly increase again? Hope someone or Tedster can help

[tedster]

Seeing PR change in between major updates is a relatively new thing - and not well understood. There's just not enough history on this phenomenon for me to answer with any certainty at all. One thing seems cleaar - if you created new urls since the last PR Update at the end of September, they are unlikely to show any PR until the next update.

Just focus on traffic, not PR and not even rankings to any major degree. Watch your server logs, Webmaster Tools and the site: operator to be sure the new urls are getting spidered properly. It will probably take a new PR Update before your new urls show PR.

[bleached]

Hi Tedster and all. Just a recap of the PR migration and how it worked out. This will be expressed on a time scale for the 301 redirects:

October 2nd - Site migration and 301`s implemented
October 10th - Week or so later lost all PR on new URLs (all to PR N/A)
October 30th - Month later, PR N/A now changed to PR0
December 29th - 3 months after 301 redirects back to original URL PR

In summary of my experience, donīt change URLs and if you do, donīt panic if you loose your PR, 3 months later you will get it back (fingers crossed). Hope this helps other webmasters.

[jimbeetle]

Thanks, bleached. Good post to reference for when the question pops up again.

[SEOcean]

Hi Bleached,

Thank you for the info. I'm just now planning to do something similar and it's good to hear this level of detail so we know what to expect.

Did you notice any significant changes to your traffic or positions during the transition, or just the loss of toolbar PR?

Thank you for sharing your experience!

[bleached]

Hi SEOcean, I didnīt see any significant change in traffic during the three months. In fact, if any change it was positive as the domain extensions helped with the SEO.

One thing I forgot to add, during the last google PR update (canīt remember if it was late November or early Decemeber) the redirects remained on PR N/A. I thought the redirects would of been updated then, however not the case!

[tedster]

The PR Update was actually a little later than that - confirmed on December 31 [webmasterworld.com] - and the update before that was in September. You probably caught the first traces of the recent toolbar update on Dec 29. That pretty much accounts for the PR changes you saw (and didn't see), and the fact that there was no impact on your traffic also lines up. TBPR changes only.

[g1smd]

I always estimate three to six months for the effects to change over, and that seems about right.

I'll chip in with another related effect, and on the same timescale as yours. For a site redirected to new internal URLs in early October, Google dropped the last of the old URLs just a few days ago. I haven't looked at PR for that site, but I expect it will follow the same pattern as yours.

[readadam]

Hi guys, good article. I have used a 301 on a few sites and it works really well. As bleached experienced, on one of my projects, the traffic increased (because of better SEO and url structure) but GPR disappeared.

I believe that all inbound links still count for the new urls.

I am about to do a new 301 for a subdomain ie - http://www.me.example.com to http://www.example.com. The current site is php and I am going to change this to HTML. I have the codes to use in the htaccess but I was wondering if anyone had problems with the php re-directs?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 12, 2009]
[edit reason] delinked url [/edit]

[aakk9999]

@readadam, do you mean redirecting php pages through htaccess or doing redirect through php code itself (i.e. not using htaccess)?

As far as I know, redireting php pages through htaccess is just like any other pattern matching redirect.

Is what you want to do is to show html page URL instead of php URL whilst still having php generating pages on server? In this case you need both, 301 redirect and URL rewrite.

We are doing this on one of our site and have no problems.

[readadam]

aakk9999 - Yeah, it was re-directing php to html through htaccess and having static HTML pages on normal server. Good to hear you have had no probs with it. cheers.

[aakk9999]

If you have static html pages physically present as files on the server then you will not need URL rewrite, you will only need 301 redirect from php --> html.

If your html pages are not physically present on the server (e.g. they are dynamically generated by php), then, apart from 301, you will need url rewrite so that a request for html can be translated into php module with query string.

[readadam]

ok cool thanks.