Correctly Dealing With Redirects

[mitonmark]

Hi,

Hope someone might be able to help me with this.

One of our sites was built badly and the orginal url structure was to have mydomain.com/index.php but these have been changed to mydomain.com by a developer who has put the redirects in place.

The problem is that in webmaster tools my link count has dropped to 18 from nearly 2300.

I am assuming that Google is not seeing the redirect, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[simon_realbuzz]

Is it possible that some of the pages have inadvertently had a noindex meta tag added to them or that certain pages are blocked in error by your robots.txt? Without your site URL it is very difficult for any of us to ascertain the issue.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Make sure it is a 301 redirect, not a 302 redirect.

It also takes a couple weeks for google to reindex the new urls and adjust its rankings/stats.

[MickEdwards]

I would install Fiddler and check the header response of your URLs. Otherwise screamingfrog is the way to go. Oleg might be right in that the developer might have set 302 redirects.  If you post the URL we could confirm for you.

In .htaccess if the redirect doesn't explicitly end with the R=301 directive, typically [R=301,L] then the default is a 302 temporary redirect which doesn't pass on link value.

Also for an accurate assessment of links I would use Open Site Explorer.

[DaveSottimano]

Just adding to what the others have said, but there could be a number of reasons:

1. WMT is slow
2. You actually lost the links
3. The links aren't being redirected properly, i.e. multiple hops, no redirect at all
4. 302's and other redirection CAN actually show up in WMT, you'll see it listed as "via this intermediary link....

The advice the others gave is solid, you'll need to double check with some kind of HTTP response code tool to check. Please supply a URL.

Cheers,

Dave