.htaccess and SEO

[willwade26]

Hey Everyone,

New to SEOMOZ and I have an important question:

We launched a new version of our site about 6 months ago and had a TON of redirects in our HTCaccess file due to a change in our permalink structure (over 2000 easily).

Anyways, recently we went back in and took 2000+ lines of individual htaccess redirects and consolidated them into a RegularExpression for the ones where we could find a pattern for and the others (30 or so) are just the actual redirect link.

Since doing that, it appears our search engine traffic has dropped a bit. It's not crazy, but it's definitely noticeable. I'm not an SEO expert, so my question is this the reason why? How long will we see this decline before we're back at normal levels? We're seeing a lot less crawl errors since doing this, so I think it's a good thing. But I just wanted to check and see.

The site is http://thetechblock.com if you want to take a look. Any help would be really appreciated.

[willwade26]

Anyone?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Bayan,

Sorry to hear your search engine traffic has dropped.

It might be helpful if you posted the section of the .htaccess file in question.

Here's some things I would double check:

1. Does the .htaccess file serve a 301 response code for the redirect? (probably, but worth double checking)  What I might try is create a file of all your OLD urls and upload them into a crawler like Screaming Frog and test them all out to see if they both redirect to the proper URL and with the correct response code.

2. Did you redirect the 2000 pages to unique URLs, or did you redirect them to a single url (or handful or urls)? If you consolidated your URLs to only a handful, this could effect your rankings.

3. Did the content and other HTML elements stay the same during the redirect? For example, did the title tags stay the same or reasonable close to the original? Big differences could cause the URLs to lose relevance and thus rankings.

4. Less crawl errors = good. I would check the Index Status in Google Webmaster to see if the number of pages discovered/indexed matches up well with the number of URLs on your site.

5. Proper sitemaps submitted? Oftentimes when you change your URL structure it's good to submit 2 sitemaps - one listing all your old URLs and another for the new. This way, search engines will attempt to crawl the old URLs and "process" the redirect. Probably not an issue for you since the change was 6 months ago, however.

6. Finally, I'd keep my eyes open for any other causes that may have caused the drop in traffic, i.e. Algorythm Updates, Site Issues, Backlinks and so on.

That's all I can think of, but there may be more. Let us know if you find anything!