What should You Do When You Mess Up A 301 Redirect?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

Ok, so I moved about 200 products off of one site to another... and I of course screwed up the redirects, sending them to a very unfriendly 404 page.

They were only up for about 18 hours, but it does look like googlebot came by and did a lot of indexing during those 18 hours.

The proper redirects are in place now (knock on wood), and I am checking the error logs every fifteen minutes (even though they only get updated every three hours or so).

So do I need to "do anything" to make up for this mistake? I am assuming that googlebot will be back to try and index the original URLs on the original site again, right? (Please say 'yes').

Please tell me that it won't try to index a 301 redirect, discover that it goes to a 404 page, and then say, "Ok, I won't crawl that original URL again because it has been 301 redirected."

[g1smd]

You wanted to redirect from A to B but accidentally redirected from A to X.

Fix the rules to now redirect from A to B.

Consider also adding a rule to redirect from X to B as well.

Make sure that all internal links within the site point to B.

[Planet13]

Thank you, g1smd:

Make sure that all internal links within the site point to B.

Do you mean, all the internal links on SITE A point to site B?

Because I removed those products, I don't have any more internal links on Site A that point to those pages (except for the XML site map, which I was planning on leaving in place for a little while - I don't know how long exactly I should leave it up).

[g1smd]

What I meant is this:

Make sure you have no links pointing to A or X.

[tangor]

(even though they only get updated every three hours or so).

Get a life!

I am assuming that googlebot will be back to try and index the original URLs on the original site again, right? (Please say 'yes').

Forever. One thing Google (Bing, too) does not do is forget a URL...

then say, "Ok, I won't crawl that original URL again because it has been 301 redirected."

Won't happen. See above.

Best you can do it wait it out, providing your 301s are correct!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Forever. One thing Google (Bing, too) does not do is forget a URL...

Amen, it's rumored that there's a secure copy of everything online in a disaster proof bunker (or is that a deep space station these days?). Forever is accurate :-)

[TheMadScientist]

Fit It! lol

It'll correct itself and they'll keep crawling, but g1smd is giving some really good advice, imo, so I'd probably follow it.

One other thing you might do is submit an updated xml sitemap with the redirected urls, and a 'last-modified' date of today or something, to trigger a spidering, then change it to reflect the new urls in a week or so. (This is just a thought I'm having and is untested, so use at your own risk and ymmv.)

[g1smd]

Google warns to omit "URLs which redirect" from your XML sitemap.

[TheMadScientist]

Yeah, but my thought was if it wasn't going to be permanent you would know it's been crawled when you get the warning about your site maps and then you could change the ones that were spidered over to the new location ... I've had them in there before (accidentally) and not noticed and not had any ranknings effect from the warning, so imo it might not hurt and updating the mod date in it might trigger a spidering.

Anyway, like I said, I haven't tried it to get a re-spidering of redirected urls processed faster, but I can say I've had redirects in them and it hasn't hurt rankings. (I don't see how they could possibly take xml sitemaps locations into account for rankings anyway, especially if they don't factor in validity of code ... too easy to mess those sitemaps up to make it a ranking variable, imo.)

[Planet13]

Google warns to omit "URLs which redirect" from your XML sitemap.

Thanks for the tip. I did not know that.