How do I recover from a double 301 mistake?

[kramerico2]

We have a site that was ranking top 10 for 15 KW and top 20 for about 40. We decided to restructure the site to create silos. The old site used a plugin to create ".html" pages and the juice in Google was all on those pages.

We asked our developer to eliminate the plugin / .html and forward the .html pages to our new structure.

Instead, he took a shortcut and did a mass forward in code which resulted in all pages - such as "example.com/mypage.html" now forwarding to "example.com/mypage/" - He then did a 301 redirect from those pages with the "/" such as example.com/mypage/ to "example.com/my-new-page/". He did this for over 500 pages.

To make matters worse, he mis-mapped about 100 pages and Google saw them as 404s, then in fixing those errors, new ones kept popping up. Those are now fixed.

The net result is that we dropped like a stone on all of our rankings.

Moving forward, do you think we can regain ground by manually doing 301s for the original .html pages to their new locations and eliminating the interim step?

What would be your suggestions to recover as quickly as possible?

[seanginnaw]

Hey there,

My advice would be to minimize those redirect chains as soon as you can, not just for potential SEO benefit but more to lessen server stress and speed up page load.

Interestingly, chained 301s don't lose equity in the eyes of a search engine now (see updates below) so it's interesting that you're seeing such a fluctuation.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

For the .html to trailing slash pages, did you say that he did a page-to-page remap for all of them instead of putting a redirect rule in place to catch them all? That seems like a crazy thing to put in place! Your redirect file (htaccess or similar) must be enormous!

Hope that helps,

Sean

[kramerico2]

Thanks Sean,

No, he first redirected the .html pages in code so:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+([^.]+).html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1/ [R=301,L]

So 500+ pages were redirected from .html to /

Step 2, he made manual 301s from the / to the new structure so for instance "example.com/mypage/" redirected to  "example.com/new-parent/my-new-page/"

But Google has ranked example.com/mypage.html

So the question is - would doing the above be a contributor to losing our ranks?  If so, would we benefit by manually linking "example.com/mypage.html" to "example.com/new-parent/my-new-page/" and therefore skipping the interim step?

Second, you mentioned having so many redirects could be problematic. Our reason for the change was to create a hierarchy - before we started, there were 500 pages with no parent...no hiearchy at all. So we created a silo structure and a proper site map. The 500 pages now belong to this hiearchy and the slugs are all different than before. Do you have a suggestion for a better way to do the 301s other than manually in this case?

Thanks for the advice!

[seanginnaw]

To be honest, it all looks correct and that would have been the way I did it. If Google is currently not ranking the correct URL, it'll likely update when they take the 301 into account when they next recrawl the page.

It might be a factor in why rankings have dropped but it's likely to pick back up again when their index is updated. My advice is to hold tight and hope it all fixes itself soon.

All the best,

Sean

[kramerico2]

Gotcha, ok well that's a relief. In troubleshooting the drop we are looking at a few more factors. Do any of these sound suspicious?

1. In redirecting everything, our developer was sloppy. There were slug conflicts all over the place and this resulted in hundreds of 404s and mis-directed pages (pages redirected to y instead of x), which he only corrected after we manually found the 404s. We went through 5 or 6 rounds of this.

2. We had over 100 pages without titles and he ran some script that rewrote a lot of existing titles. When we discovered this, he went back and fixed all the titles but only after Google reported 100+ duplicate titles.

3. We installed an internal link building plugin (that we've since deleted) and created business rules for cross linking. This resulted in hundreds of cross links with exact anchor text of the slug / page titles. As mentioned, we've since rolled this back but since the site only has about 50 external backlinks, wondering if the internal link building over-optimized and triggered a penalty. If this is something you think they'd ding us for, now that we've fixed the internal links, do you think Google will give us back some juice? Or is it gone daddy gone?

Otherwise, our pages rank 95%-98% optimized according to Moz and we have zero technical issues at this stage.

[kramerico2]

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