URL no longer ranks after redesign, everything was done by the book. Can someone plz help?

Davit1985

Hey Mozzers,

After a redesign of our site we have a huge problem with 1 particular URL. We can't understand what is wrong with it. Our site was redesigned about 3 weeks ago everything was done to make sure the process was smooth. Content on the new url was exactly the same as before, title tags and meta descriptions were copy pasted, 301 redirects were set up. Our site has 47 pages and all other pages are still ranking the same way as they used to before the update but this one url has just dropped from serps or once a while is appearing on 2nd, 3rd pages.

URL in question is: https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service/

We are a MOZ pro client and have the data on where this url was ranking prior to the update. Keywords it ranked for #1position on page one- some examples ( car service to dulles, car service to iad, dulles airport limo service) and many more. The only thing that has changed was the url the old url was https://www.dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html

After the new design we got rid of the ".html" on all our urls, the funny thing is that all our 46 urls were updated the same way but only this url is experiencing this problem. Google search console shows that url is indexed and on Google but sometimes it does not show up on serps.

Can anyone please help? 20% of our business comes from this url and we are loosing real money everyday and I can't figure out was is wrong with it.

Thanks all,

Davit

BlueprintMarketing

Hi Davit,You need to link internally from your current site

The page is an orphan according to Moz and only has when the mean pointing to it according to link research tools
You are #5 in the SERPS as on now I searched from New England
Google is not indexing the full page.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XzsiiN9ea0IJ:https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
You change from Wordpress to?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170928065156/http://www.dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html
LRT Power3
3
LRT Trust1
Backlinks 2M
Ref Domains 510
PAGE
LRT Power3
6
LRT Trust2
Backlinks 2
Ref Domains 1
Links
https://imgur.com/xE6BM82.png
I will run a test and post if that's ok?
Have you checked Google search console will you try to make sure that it crawls it again. It appears that it's not very high priority page considering the last time crawled by Google was November 20
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XzsiiN9ea0IJ:https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Hope this helps,Tom

xE6BM82.png

BlueprintMarketing

Hi Davit, I found the problem fix your servers redirect chains

Google recommends to not have more than 5 hops in a redirect chain. We found 6 hops. This could mean slower or delayed crawling as well as potential SEO problems caused by this.

Look https://i.imgur.com/w40qS3b.jpg

https://imgur.com/w40qS3b.jpg

Your .html page
https://imgur.com/eIQmVbc.png
https://imgur.com/xE6BM82.png
https://imgur.com/w40qS3b.jpg
Fix your nginx config file.
https://cobwwweb.com/remove-html-extension-and-trailing-slash-in-nginx-config
https://i.imgur.com/w40qS3b.png

Then this hits a 302 (will not pass Link equity)https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html/

| 302 | 302 redirect to:https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service |

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url

Might be faster to use https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/224509547-Recommended-Page-Rules-to-Consider

<code>RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d</code>

checks that if the specified file or directory respectively doesn't exist, then the rewrite rule proceeds:

`RewriteRule^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]`

[https://www.aleydasolis.com/htaccess-redirects-generator/page-with-to-without-extension/](https://www.aleydasolis.com/htaccess-redirects-generator/page-with-to-without-extension/)

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?(.*).(html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule>

Remove HTML Extension

There are a few different ways to go about removing the .html extension. I've found the following to work just fine:

<code>server {
  rewrite ^(/.*)\.html(\?.*)?$ $1$2 permanent;
}</code>

Then we have to make sure Nginx knows what files to look for, and for that we use the try_files directive. We'll look for a file with the current $uri and an .html extension, and if no file exists, we check for a directory with that name and serve the index. Otherwise, we render a 404 error.

<code>server {
  rewrite ^(/.*)\.html(\?.*)?$ $1$2 permanent;

  index index.html;
  try_files $uri.html $uri/ $uri =404;
}</code>

Remove Trailing Slashes

After that first step, we have a URL without a .html extension. However, if the file of interest was an index.html file, it could still be accessed via the name of the parent directory with a trailing slash.

For me, for example, I was getting a URL at http://cobwwweb.com/page/2/, but I didn't want the trailing slash.

We have to remove the trailing slash after we have removed the .html extension.

The gotcha here is that we have to alter the try_files directive to look for an index.html file first.

<code>server {
  rewrite ^(/.*)\.html(\?.*)?$ $1$2 permanent;
  rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;

  index index.html;
  try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri/ $uri =404;
}</code>

Pulling It Together

To pull it all together, I'll share a slightly-altered version of my config for this site.

<code>server {
  listen   80;
  server_name cobwwweb.com *.cobwwweb.com;

  rewrite ^(/.*)\.html(\?.*)?$ $1$2 permanent;
  rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;

  root /path/to/project/root;
  index index.html;
  try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri/ $uri =404;

  error_page 404 /404.html;
  error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;</code>

Hey, regular site audit we'll find out more these problems. do you want one?

Hope this helps,

Let me know if not,

Tom

eIQmVbc.png w40qS3b.jpg xE6BM82.png

BlueprintMarketing

This post is deleted!

Rajesh.Prajapati

You are facing problem due to redirection rule. You are saying you are redirecting as 301 but actually status code is 302. So you need to solve this issue first. http://prntscr.com/q9fbah

Davit1985

Hi Thomas, we are working on fixing the issues you mentioned right now. I will update you if it works. Thanks for your detailed analysis. It means the world to us.

effectdigital

This echoes what Thomas said but I'll weigh in anyway. This is your old URL: https://www.dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html. You say it has been redirected to the new page with a 301, which is only partially accurate. You need to install this Chrome extension which will allow you to inspect redirects and chains: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll?hl=en. Visit the old URL (http://www.dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html) and you will see that it redirects no less than four times (instead of just once). Google probably didn't follow your redirect all the way through. This is your page's redirect path: https://www.dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html (301) -> https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html (301) -> https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service.html/ (301) -> https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service (301) -> https://dcacar.com/dulles-limo-service/ (200) . Redirects should be A to B, simple. They shouldn't chain up like this

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