How to fix issues from 301s

[FireMountainGems]

Case:

We are currently in the middle of a site migration from .asp to .net and Endeca PageBuilder, and from a homebrewed search provider to Endeca Search. We have migrated most of our primary landing pages and our entire e-commerce site to the new platforms. During the transition approximately 100 of our primary landing pages were inadvertently 302ed to the new version. Once this was caught they were immediately changed to 301s and submitted to the Google’s index through webmaster tools. We initially saw increases in visits to the new pages, but currently (approximately 3 weeks after the change from 301 to 302) are experiencing a significant decline in visits.

Issue:

My assumption is many of the internal links (from pages which are now 301ed as well) to these primary landing pages are still pointing to the old version of the primary landing page in Google’s cache, and  thus have not passed the importance and internal juice to the new versions. There are no navigational links or entry points to the old supporting pages left, and I believe this is what is driving the decline.

Proposed resolution:

I intend to create a series of HTML sitemaps of the old version (.asp) of all pages which have recently been 301ed. I will then submit these pages to Google’s index (not as sitemaps, just normal pages) with the selection to index all linked pages. My intention is to force Google to pick up all of the 301s, thus enforcing the authority channels we have set up.

Question 1:

Is the assumption that the decline could be because of missed authority signals reasonable?

Question 2:

Could the proposed solution be harmful?

Question 3:

Will the proposed solution be adequate to resolve the issue?

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

David

[jimthornton]

Hi David,

Can you run a: site:yourwebsite.com search in Google and report back? ie. find some of those pages and then check the cache date on them if the URLs are the same? Similarly, you can check the URL structure if that's changed by combing through all the google results of your sites pages in the SERP to see. If old URLs that have been 301'd exist, then it hasn't been recrawled and updated.

Once we know whether its an issue of them not having been recrawled, you'll better understand what the possible issue is and go from there.

[FireMountainGems]

I did run a search on our old pages in the SERPs and found a large number of them are still showing. I also found most of our new pages, some where both the old and new were represented. I have also seen a lot of our positions go from page one to not in the top 100, these are all from pages which were 301ed to a nearly exact replica in the new version. I had originally thought Google had hit them, but not updated their listing to the new version. I am now thinking that they are just being ignored, and have not had their 301 picked up.