Previously ranking #1 in google, web page has 301 / url rewrite, indexed but now showing for keyword search?

[seanclc]

Two web pages on my website, previously ranked well in google, consistent top 3 places for 6months+, but when the site was modified, these two pages previously ending .php had the page names changed to the keyword to further improve (or so I thought). Since then the page doesn't rank at all for that search term in google.

I used google webmaster tools to remove the previous page from Cache and search results, re submitted a sitemap, and where possible fixed links to the new page from other sites. On previous advice to fix I purchased links, web directories, social and articles etc to the new page but so far nothing... Its been almost 5 months and its very frustrating as these two pages previously ranked well and as a landing page ended in conversions.

This problem is only appearing in google. The pages still rank well in Bing and Yahoo. Google has got the page indexed if I do a search by the url, but the page never shows under any search term it should, despite being heavily optimised for certain terms. I've spoke to my developers and they are stumped also, they've now added this text to the effected page(s) to see if this helps.

Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
$newurl=SITE_URL.$seo;
Header("Location:$newurl");

Can Google still index a web page but refuse to show it in search results? All other pages on my site rank well, just these two that were once called something different has caused issues?

Any advice? Any ideas, Have I missed something? Im at a loss...

[Maximise]

It sounds like you went about this in the wrong way. What you should have done first is 301 redirect the old url to the new url and then update all you sites links to also point to the new url. You have used webmaster tools to specifically tell Google not to index that page and therefore it has lost all of it's authority (the 301 would have passed most of the authority on from the start)

Use this tool and insert your old url and make sure the header returned definitely says "301 Moved permanently". How long ago was the 301 implemented? It may still recover once Google picks up the redirect.

[seanclc]

Thanks for the advice, just checked and it is saying "301 Moved Permanently" Which I'm assuming is correct.

But I must admit Im confused as to why the page is not ranking well. The page is a list of products and it ran on to a second page, the url being the same just with /page-2 at the end. Weirdly the page 2 started ranking but not the original. I then added rel="canonical" back to the original page, thinking this would help, but all this did was stop indexing page 2 and the original page still doesn't show...

Tearing my hair out!!!

The latest 301 redirect code was added 2 weeks ago, it did have 301 redirect before, but it was done in a different way...

**Previous Code : **
Header("Location:/$seo,true,301");

[Maximise]

If you used the remove URL tool to only remove page 1 from the index then that's why it won't be ranking, I'm guessing page 2 wasn't removed using this tool? I don't think the canonical tag would help you in this situation as you're now telling Google that page 2 is the same as a page you've already told them not to index!

Just to confirm, when you used the redirect checker did you put in the old url and it says 301? It's worth using the fetch as GoogleBot tool inside Webmaster tools and then adding the old url to be crawled again so that they can see it has been moved permanently. If the 301 was only implemented properly 2 weeks ago there is still the chance it will come back!

[seanclc]

Ran the fetch as google, says Success with a button "submit to index". Should I click the submit button?

[seanclc]

I should also say that was for the old URL it says Success with the button "submit to index" no mention of any 301?

[Maximise]

Do you want to give me the old url to double check for you? You can personal message me if you don't want it to be public.