Hello DP's members! I have a page of one of my websites ranked on the first page of google for a gived keyword. Recently, I had to change the url of that page and I used the 301 .htaccess redirect to transfer the ranking from the old page to the new one. Now 3 weeks are gone and google still rank my OLD page on the first page of its organic results and it does not even index the new page. Should I do anything other to make the new page indexed or I just need to wait? Any suggestions for solving this problem? As always, thank you in advance.
Post your old and new URL so we can take a look at it. Just as an FYI... The way 301's work is that you have to wait for all of the inbound links to that page to be recrawled. So if 100 pages on other sites link to your old URL, you have to wait for Google to recrawl those other 100 sites and follow the link from each of them to your old URL, discover the 301 for THAT particular inbound link, and transfer credit for that particular link to the new URL. Once all inbound links have been recrawled and the 301 disccovered for each, your rankings will return.
Create a XML sitemap that includes all your new pages and submit to SE's. Also, create a robots.txt file and inlcude the sitemap.xml protocol in it, this gets cached and crawled by google in less time. Once your sitemap.xml or robots.txt file is crawled, your new pages will start showing up in index slowly, but quickly - and sure in less than 3 weeks
301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". URL redirection, also called URL forwarding and the very similar technique domain redirection also called domain forwarding, are techniques on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.
For reindexing of redirected pages you need to submit your sitemap.xml into google webmaster tool and gain some high quality links for that new pages. your problem will resolved.
Thank you all for your suggestions. QUOTE]Post your old and new URL so we can take a look at it. Just as an FYI... The way 301's work is that you have to wait for all of the inbound links to that page to be recrawled. So if 100 pages on other sites link to your old URL, you have to wait for Google to recrawl those other 100 sites and follow the link from each of them to your old URL, discover the 301 for THAT particular inbound link, and transfer credit for that particular link to the new URL. Once all inbound links have been recrawled and the 301 disccovered for each, your rankings will return.
A sitemap should not be necessary. Unless you have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, crawlers should be able to crawl your site just fine assuming you have a good interlinking structure and information architecture. Sitemaps are really only useful for: 1) new sites with no inbound links 2) huge sites w/ hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, and 3) sites that are not crawler friendly. The search engines will discover the 301 redirects and transfer credit for each inbound link to the old URLs over to the new URLs as it recrawls each of the inbound links to the old URLs. This is what takes time and can lead to a drop in rankings while it's occuring. Your 301 redirects (at least the one for that page) appear to be working find. If you go here and enter your URL in URI text box and hit submit, you can watch the browser/web server interaction. The old page returns a 301 with the new location. So the browser requests the new location which returns a 200 Ok status as it should.
I checked the new page yu mentioned above. It is cached and crawl by google. Please check once again. Also i saw your sitemap.xml file. I believe it requires a bit of modification. Btw, please check once again in Google, I think your new pages are cached. use this operator - 'cache:your new page url' to check. If your new pages are not cached, just notify me again!
Hello, Thank you for your reply. Yes, that page is now indexed. Could you please tell me why the sitemap.xml requires a bit of modification? Is not well done? Thank you.