Old dynamic pages redirect via 301s to new pages, but not ranking

[venunath]

Hi All,

I have re-write the all dynamic url to static pages via 301 code. Is this Correct? And After few months, all new static pages are indexed but not ranking in Google SERP.

Or i need to send those dynamic urls to 404 code?

Suggest me.

[phranque]

did you also change your site structure, internal navigation, etc?

[venunath]

yes.

[g1smd]

Be sure to test that the response really is 301 and not 302.

[aakk9999]

A few questions:

- Have your dynamic URLs dropped out from the index? If you do site: command using a pattern found in dynamic URL, do you still see many of them?
- Are you by any chance blocking dynamic URLs in robots.txt?
- In Google Webmaster Tools, if you go and check <title> and meta description section, have you got many duplicate titles/meta descriptions reported? This may indicate dynamic URLs not yet being re-crawled by Google
- How many URLs being changed to static are we talking about? If there are many, it is possible that Google has not yet re-crawled your old dynamic URLs to see the redirect.

For better understanding, when a site changes all URLs from dynamic to static sitewide, usually the following happens:

1) You change all internal links to static on your website (internal navigation, on-page internal links etc)
2) You set up 301 redirect from dynamic URLs to static
3) Google comes to your site and sees all these new URLs (static URLs)
4) Google is busy harvesting and crawling these new URLs
5) At this point Google has TWO URLs for each content page - the new static URL and the old dynamic URL. The new static URL has at this point duplicate content of the old dynamic URL so it may not be valued much
6) Google is not seeing dynamic URLs being interlinked within your site, so it crawls them at the slower rate
7) As each old dynamic URL is crawled, Google sees 301, drops the old dynamic URL from index and consolidates link juice (minus speculated 15% that is lost through redirect)

The problem is that steps 6) and 7) will require a period of time. How fast this happens depends on your crawling budget, the size of the site and the number of URLs that you have changed. It also depends on how many external links these old dynamic URLs had - from my experience, old dynamic URLs with external links get crawled sooner, whilst it may take Google longer to re-crawl now "orphan" dynamic URLs

Further, point 5) can cause old dynamic URLs that are not yet recrawled to drop in ranking too - reasons could be that Google has less and less internal links pointing to them but it has not yet recrawled them to see the redirect, and further, there is a static URL with duplicate content

[JD_Toims]

did you also change your site structure, internal navigation, etc?

yes.

I'd guess this is the issue, not the redirects.

Google has stated they take time to "trust" redirects [even 301s] due to the number of times redirects change, but it should only take 3 or so weeks at the most [IIRC] for them to be fully applied, which is way less than the "few months" stated in the OP.

Note: Double checking the status code to ensure it's a 301 with the Check HTTP Header Response tool [first link on the left of the Webmaster Tools section] on the free tools subdomain [freetools.webmasterworld.com...] is probably a good idea.

[lucy24]

Do you use Google Webmaster Tools? When you're in the middle of a redirect they can be helpful in a perverse way, because you'll see a flurry of notices about duplicate titles and duplicate meta description (assuming only the URL has changed). It's their way of telling you that both URLs are currently indexed; after a while the old ones should disappear.

:: detour to check whether they're still complaining about the pages I renamed at the beginning of the month ::

[venunath]

All my new urls are indexed and old urls are de-indexed in Google SERP.

But we have only one old url which is present in Google Webmaster tool.

And almost its 1 year completed by implementing 301 redirect but no changes found.

[aakk9999]

But we have only one old url which is present in Google Webmaster tool.

And almost its 1 year completed by implementing 301 redirect but no changes found.

I am not sure I understand what are you saying here. What do you mean by having only one old URL present in WMT? Where is it present, which section is it reported in?

Also, what do you mean by no changes found?

[venunath]

I am not sure I understand what are you saying here. What do you mean by having only one old URL present in WMT? Where is it present, which section is it reported in?

In GWT i noticed in Search Traffic - Internal Links

In this i found one old url.

Also, what do you mean by no changes found?

Means 1 Year completed for implementation of url rewrite but till date no changes found in keyword positions and traffic.