It's well known that 301 redirects are handy when going through a site redesign or attempting to shift link juice from one page to another. The thing is, Google can be temperamental when you change anything on your website. I've seen a Google Slap from redesigning a site, even though the content was the same! So the question was, would Google disrupt my rankings after I enabled a redirect, and if so, what would the long term effects be? Case Study: 301 Redirects & My Findings I initially needed a 301 because I was changing around my site category structure. I wanted /category/packet-tracer to become /packet-tracer/. I went through the motions of applying each 301 redirect and verifying each page redirected and also gave the HTTP status code of 301. (Even if it takes all day, verify each link-- I had several mistakes in my review of only about 20 URLs) Google's Time Delay - It took about 3-5 days for Google to even notice that the change took place, despite the page being very popular and well-crawled consistently. Ranking Woes - When Google finally did notice the change, my key term "packet tracer" led visitors to any site but mine- I was deindexed! This continued for 48 hours as Google decided what to do. Rankings : A Visual The below chart shows that not only did my rankings come back, but for some reason it came back stronger than before. Whether or not the 301 redirect case study had anything to do with it remains to be unknown. Image of Ranking History Conclusion Success! You shouldn't experience any ill long-term effects. You may notice some downtime, but that should be the gist of it! Feel free to share comments and stories of your own
I have noticed the same thing on my site... I made some content changes and added 301 redirects to firm up my http pages vs https... My Goggle traffic tanked for about 2 days and popped back - not sure if it stronger (To many variables changed in the week after) - But I think the Google just put my site in a holding pattern while they reevaluated things
Nice. It's kinda weird as to how your rankings got better after getting back on the SERPs. Maybe the URL structure played the differencing factor on this issue. Were you running on wordpress by any chance, cause if you were you could've done it all automatically using plugins rather than doing it manually.
Yes I was running Wordpress. I would rather do it myself, though. Can't afford to have WordPress plugins have a bug and then me miss out. It's too simple to do, anyway- took me no longer than 10 minutes.
Did you go with a better URL structure? Was the title tag kept the same? Let us know what all the variables were, and which stayed the same (title tag, h1 h2 and h3 tags, keyterms added to the URL etc). Thanks for the thread by the way, nice to see people giving info, not just asking questions
I am also going to do something like that, rather reverse of what you've done /keyword to /category/keyword. The reason for that is that I am shifting that static site to wordpress. I hope every goes well.
I doubt your page was "deindexed" (as in NO version of the page was in their index). What likely happened was that the old URL was replaced with the new URL in their index, but the new URL didn't have enough known links to rank. The way 301 redirects are handled at Google are as follows: Say your old URL has 100 inbound links (link1, link2, ..., link100), and you 301 redirect it to a new URL. The first time Google follows an inbound link (like link1) to the old URL, they will discover the 301 redirect and request the new URL. They remove your old URL from their index, replace it with the new URL, and give the new URL credit for that link (link1). But at that point they only know about 1 inbound link to the new URL, so it no longer ranks as well as the old URL which had 100 known inbound links. And the old URL is no longer in the index so it doesn't rank either. When Google crawls a second link to the old URL (say, link2), they will discover the 301 redirect, request the new URL, and transfer credit for that link (link2) from the old URL to the new URL. Now they know about 2 inbound links to the new URL. This process continues until Google has recrawled all 100 links to the old URL, discovered the 301 redirect for each link, and transfered credit for each link from the old URL to the new URL. At the point when all of the inbound links to the old URL have been recrawled and credit for those links have all been transfered to the new URL, the new URL will typically start ranking like the old one used to. How long it takes for your rankings to recover depends on how many inbound links you have and how often those sites that link to you get crawled. Sometimes it might take days... in other cases, it can take several weeks... even a month or two. Of course there is a slight PR loss due to the damping factor in the PR calculation, but its like 10-15% and usually not enough to cause a noticable difference in rankings.