Hello all, First off- I have searched through the forums and have not found an answer to this specific question. If there is another thread on this exact topic please let me know. A couple of weeks ago I had completed a project to acquire a large quantity of old links and 301 redirect them to the new version of the same page on our sites. I had done this to improve the user experience, consolidate link authority, and insure the URL being indexed in the SERPs shows the current version of our URLs with titles and meta-descriptions. I tested the redirects and all are working. I implemented the redirects and submitted the old links in a sitemap to help insure they are crawled and thus indexed. Please note that all old URLs were removed from the sitemap in future submissions. Though this did seem to work in terms of showing the new links over the old links in the SERPs this has had a strange effect on our traffic. I had annotated the date in Google Analytics of when the URLs were redirected. Over the next few days our visitors nearly doubled! Looking into this further I found this actually may not be a good thing. See below for a quick list of stats that had changed since the pages were redirected: Visits UP Unique Visitors UP New Visits UP Mobile Visitors UP (I don't understand the reason for this one) Pageviews DOWN (slightly) Page / Visit DOWN Avg. Visit Duration DOWN Bounce Rate UP After quite a bit of analysis segmenting the data it looks like we're receiving a great deal more visits from new visitors that are not converting. They either bounce, don't stay long or don't complete any goals. I did some additional research and found a number of recommendations to submit the old links on a sitemap to help crawl and show search engines that the pages have been changed. More research revealed that submitting sitemaps with redirects is actually a bad idea since redirects in a sitemap file indicate 'dirt'. Is it just a matter of waiting it out just the same as after a site migration? I suspect that the large submissions of redirected URLs raised a flag so now increased non-branded traffic is being sent to the sites to test their validity. I understand now that it likely would have been more successful not to submit the sitemap and let the search engines crawl the old page redirects naturally. If in the case our rankings have changed due to sitemap 'dirt' is there any way to fix the issue? I'd like to follow best practices as close to the letter as possible. Any insight provided would be greatly appreciated Thank you, Scott
Scott, there are some confusing word choices in your description. When you say, "A couple of weeks ago I had completed a project to acquire a large quantity of old links and 301 redirect them to the new version of the same page on our sites." -- don't think you actually bought links from other sites? (That's what "acquire" implies). I take it you simply 301-redirected many links on your own site to some new pages on your own site? Is that correct? Please confirm. If this is right, then the correct solution would have been to put the new versions of the pages on the same URLs! But since you have already 301-ed the old pages, that's the second best solution, it's not incorrect. Do not sweat the stuff about sitemaps, don't worry about it. Don't submit the old sitemap, it's a funny idea, Google never required anything of the sort. always submit the current sitemap. But what you have described about sitemaps, just make sure the latest submission was the current sitemap. When you change your pages, move them, change their content or even their design and other seemingly insignificant elements, your rankings are bound to fluctuate sometimes. Sometimes even small things can upset him. Don't worry about an increase in irrelevant traffic. Only worry if your sales are dropping. There can be many reasons why your traffic has increased in the way you describe. I don't want to speculate, but let me tell you how you can investigate. The segmentation you describe does not make sense to me (the way you describe it). You are looking at the wrong data. Instead, in Google Analytics go to Acquisions and figure out which traffic source is bringing this new traffic. Is it coming from referrals? (You can drill down to the particular domains sending the traffic) From Organic Search? (Maybe you ranked for some irrelevant keyword.) From AdWords? (Look into adding negative keywords and being careful with broad match.) From social media? (You can drill down to the particular domains sending the traffic.) I hope this helps!
No, I had not bought links. The redirects mentioned were for old product URLs that had not been in use for several years. The redirects were setup to regain any authority and fix the SERP listing for those links to insure it’s using our current content. The content is the same on both pages- it’s just a different URL. I wouldn’t want to risk duplicate content penalties in any case. I’ll be sure to only submit clean sitemaps in the future. I was only concerned if converting visitors are dropping- I agree that I don’t need to worry about irrelevant traffic-. Could you provide a recommendation on what the right data might be? Most of the new traffic coming in is from direct new visitors. Unfortunately direct doesn’t give much info
Check with ahrefs and see if your competitors purposely started spamming you. It happen to me. Someone placed bunch of sape links to my sites with irrelevant anchors, reported me to Google and eventually my site got banned. I also saw irrelevant traffic.
Thank you Lloyd, but I don't think my site is being spammed. The large increase in irrelevant traffic was marked on the same date that the redirects were implemented which tells me that was the cause