301 Redirect and SEO Rankings

[rajatsharma]

I recently restructured my webpage URL's (about 300 ~ 75% of my total website) to make the URL paths more SEO friendly. Within a few hours of restructuring the pages, I did a 301 redirect to my old URL's and pointed them to the new pages. I have seen ~ 50% drop in organic traffic.

I started the restructuring exercise 14 days ago and finished it a few hours back. I have 3 questions:

1. How long will it take for me to recover my old traffic. Will I recover most of it or some of it?
2. Due to a glitch in the specified path, some old URL's were wrongly redirected (this happened with 9 pages to be exact). I will explain exactly what happened:

www.redirct.com/superseonow1  ----  redirected to ---- www.redirectnow.com/seonow1

**/superseonow was 301 redirected to /seonow. After 3 days I realize that /superseonow1 was actually /supernow1. The same thing happened to 9 pages - /superseonow2, /superseonow3 ..... **

I have removed all the wrong redirects. When I tried to enter the correct (old) paths now and 301 redirect them to the new paths, the page was not found using the old paths.

Should I redirect the old paths to the New ones even now?

3. Finally, in how much time after you change the page structure should you use the 301 redirect. Since I had two different teams working on this job, there could have been up to a 24 hour gap between the redirection.

[MikeRoberts]

1. Assuming the pages are 100% exactly the same except for the URL, you should bounce back without a problem.

2. If i'm getting this right... Page 1 is the Old URL & Page 2 is the New URL but Page 1 accidentally redirected to Page 3. Now you want to know if Page 1 should be correctly redirected to Page 2 like originally intended? Yes.

3. While its always best to try to redirect as soon as possible, a 24 hour period of the page 404ing prior to redirection will not kill you.

Also you may want to update your Sitemap to swap the old URLs for the correct new URLs (if necessary), submit the updated sitemap to Google & Bing webmaster tools as needed, submit the new pages in Bing WMT & do some fetch requests in Google WMT to potentially speed up the crawl & indexing of the new pages.

[MorganChessman]

Whenever you change URLs, you'll see an initial drop in traffic as Google finds and reindexes these pages. You should see a bounce back in traffic after that, but it may not be what it was before if you used 301 redirects. 301 redirects only pass 85 - 90% of link equity, so all of the pages you've 301'd are now 10 - 15% less authoritative than they were before. Depending on how you were ranking before and the strength of your competitors, this loss of link equity could have negatively affected your position on SERPs. The only way to get this link equity back is to have all of the pages linking to your old pages link to the new pages (get them to directly link to your new page), or to get enough quality links to your new page that compensate for the loss in equity.

[rajatsharma]

Thanks for that Mike.

With regard to point no 2 - Page 1 is the old URL & Page 2 is the new URL. But a wrong Page 1 URL was entered to redirect it to page 2. There is no Page 3.

In effect, what has happened is that a page (which did not ever exist) was being redirected to Page 2 while the correct page 1 path was never redirected. Now I have removed all those (wrong) 301 redirects. But when I try to redirect the correct Page 1 URL path to Page 2 now, it does not redirect.

The address bar shows me a crazy long URL path (like its coming from cache) when I enter the page 1 URL path.

[Radmandu]

Morgan,

Thank you for your insight. I've been pulling my hair out with how much traffic has been lost with the 301 redirects. I've come to the conclusion that we have to, in a way, start our SEO efforts over again specifically with the inbound links. Your comments just gave me a positive direction to move towards. Thank you.

• Conrad