Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?

[Evo]

Hi Guys

After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones.  We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR.

We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected.

To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following:

1. In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”.  This happens at server side.
2. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect.
3. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page.

In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!?

Thanks in advance.

Dave - www.paysubsonline.com

[NeilAnthony]

May I know which search engine rankings fell off the radar?

If it is the rankings of the old URLs, then it might be because 301 redirection would pass your link juice from the old to the new pages. It might also be good to see your new page's rankings.

It might take a little time for the passing of link juice from old to new and thus is the reason for the change in rankings.

[ChrisDyson]

Dave,

Assuming your 301 redirects are technically correct then it will take time for your new page URLs to be indexed by the major search engines.

Be aware that your rankings may not come back 100% as they were before the change.

A 301 redirect does not pass all the PR and linkjuice as many SEO's assume. You can read about it in this interview with Matt Cutts and in this illustrated summary from Rand on SEOMoz

From my personal experience what you are seeing is normal just keep doing the good work you are currently doing a quite Google search with info:yournewdomain will show if your new domain has been added to the index.

[NeilAnthony]

Yes, that is a very good point.

[evolvingSEO]

I would have set up 301s in .htaccess.

However, I think you may just be citing a correlation not causation.  You have some WAY bigger issues:

1. The homepage can be arrived at by:

• paysubsonline.com
• www.paysubsonline.com
• paysubsonline.com/index.aspx <--returns a 404
• www.paysubsonline.com/index.php <-- loads a "coming soon" page, completely different than homepage, though which you can get to - https://paysubsonline.com/howitworks.php and others etc...
• www.paysubsonline.com/index.html <---returns a 404

Redirect all possible variations on the homepage to one singular version and fix that old site that's showing up.

2. Your sitemap has all URLs that look outdated (.htm extension and have "www" while the internal links in your site do not have "www") <--update your XML sitemap and resubmit to webmaster tools

3. You have not robots.txt file.

4. You have no canonical tag - which would be the last possible line of defense against all the duplicate content.

I'd start with those things, hope that helps.

-Dan

[Evo]

I was talking about Google but looking at the reports, we have suffered with Bing and Yahoo too.

[Evo]

Dan - thanks for the info.  Looks like we have some tidying up and a few tasks to do!

[Evo]

Chris - thanks for the heads up.  It's been a month since we made the changes and we haven't started to crawl back up the rankings yet. I'll see how it goes and report back.

Cheers

Dave