Is it time to rewrite the SEO playbooks?
For what seems like forever, SEOs have operated by a set of best practices that dictate how to best handle redirection of URLs. (This is the practice of pointing one URL to another. If you need a quick refresher, here’s a handy guide on HTTP status codes.)
These tried and true old-school rules included:
- 301 redirects result in around a 15% loss of PageRank. Matt Cutts confirmed this in 2013 when he explained that a 301 loses the exact same amount of PageRank as a link from one page to another.
- 302s don’t pass PageRank. By definition, 302s are temporary. So it makes sense for search engines to treat them different.
- HTTPS migrations lose PageRank. This is because they typically involve lots of 301 redirects.
These represent big concerns for anyone who wants to change a URL, deal with an expired product page, or move an entire website.
The risk of losing traffic can mean that making no change at all becomes the lesser of two evils. Many SEOs have delayed site migrations, kept their URLs ugly, and have put off switching to HTTPS because of all the downsides of switching.
The New Rules of 3xx Redirection
Perhaps because of the downsides of redirection — especially with HTTPS — Google has worked to chip away at these axioms over the past several months.
- In February, Google’s John Mueller announced that no PageRank is lost for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. This was largely seen as an effort by Google to increase webmaster adoption of HTTPS.
- Google’s Gary Illyes told the SEO world that Google doesn’t care which redirection method you use, be it 301, 302, or 307. He explained Google will figure it out and they all pass PageRank.
- Most recently, Gary Illyes cryptically announced on Twitter that 3xx (shorthand for all 300) redirects no longer lose PageRank at all.
30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore.
— Gary Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2016
Do these surprising changes mean all is well and good now?
Yes and no.
While these are welcome changes from Google, there are still risks and considerations when moving URLs that go way beyond PageRank. We’ll cover these in a moment.
First, here’s a diagram that attempts to explain the old concepts vs. Google’s new announcements.
Let’s cover some myths and misconceptions by answering common questions about redirection.
Q: Can I now 301 redirect everything without risk of losing traffic?
A: No
All redirects carry risk.
While it’s super awesome that Google is no longer “penalizing” 301 redirects through loss of PageRank, keep in mind that PageRank is only one signal out of hundreds that Google uses to rank pages.
Ideally, if you 301 redirect a page to an exact copy of that page, and the only thing that changes is the URL, then in theory you may expect no traffic loss with these new guidelines.
That said, the more moving parts you introduce, the more things start to get hairy. Don’t expect your redirects to non-relevant pages to carry much, if any, weight. Redirecting your popular Taylor Swift fan page to your affiliate marketing page selling protein powder is likely dead in the water.
In fact, Glenn Gabe recently uncovered evidence that Google treats redirects to irrelevant pages as soft 404s. In other words, it's a redirect that loses both link equity and relevance.
See: How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website With Redirects
Q: Is it perfectly safe to use 302 for everything instead of 301s?
A: Again, no
A while back we heard that the reason Google started treating 302 (temporary) redirects like 301s (permanent) is that so many websites were implementing the wrong type (302s when they meant 301s), that it caused havoc on how Google ranked pages.
The problem is that while we now know that Google passes PageRank though 302s, we still have a few issues. Namely:
- We don’t know if 301s and 302s are equal in every way. In the past, we’ve seen 302s eventually pass PageRank, but only after considerable time has passed. In contrast to 301s that pass link signals fairly quickly, we don’t yet know how 302s are handled in this manner.
- 302 is a web standard, and Google isn’t the only player on the block. 302s are meant to indicate a temporary redirect, and it’s quite possible that other search engines (Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo) and social services (Facebook, Twitter, etc) treat 302s differently than Google.
Rand Fishkin summed it up nicely.
On Google's announcement that "30xs pass pagerank" -- be wary. Test. Don't assume. Pagerank isn't the only or most important ranking signal.
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 26, 2016
Google's made announcements like this before that later showed to work differently in the real world. Pays to be a skeptic in our field.
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 26, 2016
Q: If I migrate my site to HTTPS, will I keep all my traffic?
A: Maybe
Here’s the thing about HTTPS migrations: they’re complicated.
A little backstory. Google wants the entire web to switch to HTTPS. To this end, they announced a small rankings boost to encourage sites to make the switch.
The problem was that a lot of webmasters weren’t willing to trade a tiny rankings boost for the 15% loss in link equity they would experience by 301 redirecting their entire site. This appears to be the reason Google made the switch to 301s not losing PageRank.
Even without PageRank issues, HTTPS migrations can be incredibly complicated, as Wired discovered to their dismay earlier this year. It’s been over a year since we migrated Moz.com, and we’re glad we did, but there were lots of moving parts in play and the potential for lots of things to go wrong. So as with any big project, be aware of the risks as well as the rewards.
Case study: Does it work?
Unknowingly, I had the chance to test Google’s new 3xx PageRank rules when migrating a small site a few months ago. (While we don’t know when Google made the change, it appears it’s been in place for awhile now.)
This particular migration not only moved to HTTPS, but to an entirely new domain as well. Other than the URLs, every other aspect of the site remained exactly the same: page titles, content, images, everything. That made it the perfect test.
Going in, I fully expected to see a drop in traffic due to the 15% loss in PageRank. Below in the image, you can see what actually happened to my traffic.
Instead of a decline as expected, traffic actually saw a boost after the migration. Mind. Blown. This could possibly be from the small boost that Google gives HTTPS sites, though we can’t be certain.
Certainly this one small case isn't enough to prove decisively how 301s and HTTPS migrations work, but it's a positive sign in the right direction.
The New Best Practices
While it’s too early to write the definitive new best practices, there are a few salient points to keep in mind about Google’s change to how PageRank passes through 3xx redirects.
- All redirects carry a degree of SEO risk.
- While 3xx redirects preserve PageRank, 301s remain the preferred method of choice for permanent redirects. (It is unknown if search engines treat all redirects equally)
- Keep in mind that PageRank — and other link equity signals — are only a portion of the factors used by Google in ranking web pages.
- Beyond PageRank, all other rules about redirection remain. If you redirect to a non-relevant page, or buy a website in order to redirect 1,000 pages to your homepage, you likely won’t see much of a boost.
- The best redirect is where every other element stays the same, as much as possible, except for the URL.
- Successful migrations to HTTPS are now less prone to lose PageRank, but there are many other crawling and indexing issues that may negatively impact traffic+rankings.
- Changing URLs for SEO purposes, including...
- Removing multiple query parameters
- Improving directory/subfolder structure
- Including keywords in the URL
- Making URLs human-readable
When in doubt, see Best Practice #1.
Happy redirecting!
Hi Folks,
After reading the comments, it's obvious there are many situations where redirects cause a drop in traffic even in cases when only the URL changes and content stays exactly the same.
A handful of ranking factors come to mind that might come into play in these circumstances:
Finally, don't miss this post by the folks at Branded3 that seems to show that Google following and passing equity through JavaScript redirects. I can't tell from the experiment if it's PageRank that's being passed, but something is happening.
Regardless, thanks for checking out the comment section of this post. We're trying something new by kicking off some discussion with a few big questions around redirects:
1. What about low-quality or out-of-date content? For example, say you have a bunch of blog posts that are irrelevant and provide a poor user experience. Outside of updating them, Is it better to drop it and let it return a 404 status code, or should we redirect to another page?
2. What practices do you use to speed up the process of following your redirects?
3. Ever have a redirect situation go bad?
Thanks for the post, great source of info on the recent update, and this new ting is great too, gives more stuff to think about.
I've got something to share on #3.
Redirects sometimes go bad on mobile devices with poor connection, affecting user experience. That extra second may cause users to cancel the loading of the page and screw up your behavioral factors, keeping the page rank won't help here, as it says in the article – it's not the only factor.
If I am given a blog with bunch of low quality posts, I will first check the organic traffic of individual posts and will divide them in two categories.
1. Getting negligible traffic or does not get any traffic at all
2. Getting considerable traffic.
Then, I will 404 posts getting little to no traffic and will update posts getting traffic.
To answer the first question, if you have a better page on your site about the same (or similar) topic, why not redirect it? You may not gain that much, but you got nothing to lose either.
This is what I'm doing in my blog. I'm "joining" diferent posts about the same issue, by moving content to the main one and redirecting the rest to it, to increase the quality of the main post.
Thanks for this blog!
Only I'm a bit anxious for clients saying: See it doesn't matter any more we can change URL's as we like! I like you addtion Cyrus about there are a lot more factors then just changing the URL and pointing a 3XX redirect somewhere.
Like Torben says: URL's are like diamonds!
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for this article, it was really helpful.
In our case, most of the time, our clients (when they approach us) have already screwed up with their URL structure, by editing/changing it without informing search engines (by way of 301 or 302 ), causing 404 errors, leaving orphan links. You article would help us further to fix their problems in term of passing authority to the new URLs and also fix existing URL issues.
Regards,
Vijay
Also remember that every redirect introduces a latency.
In a mobile first world it is not best practise to keep you users waiting for the redirects you set up.
So the best redirect is no redirect at all (if possible).
Treat your URLs like Diamonds: They are forever.
Excellent point about latency - especially when speed is so important!
Thanks for covering this, Cyrus.
Let's not forget that browsers handle 301s and 302s differently - truer to their names (permanent vs. temporary, respectively).
A client of mine redirects their homepage to either a 'global' section or a visitor's specific country if they'd selected their region previously (based on their cookies). The redirect was a 302, so I immediately recommended changing it to a 301 for the SEO benefit. However this meant that if someone clicked on a different region previously by accident (e.g. US), then changed it to the proper region (e.g. UK), and then tried accessing the site through the homepage URL again, they'd be taken to the first (incorrect) region. The browser would treat it as 'permanent' - you've been that way before, so it'd take you through it again. In my entire career history I think it was the only time I recommended a 302 over a 301, as usability & UX won over SEO in this instance.
With the above example, at least this news means that the 302 in place isn't an SEO hindrance (assuming it's true). But even so, as Cyrus reiterates: don't go changing redirects willy-nilly, because there may be other consequences and knock-on effects...
Excellent point Steve - and what a unique edge-case! Thank you for sharing.
Is there any potential to then pick up some retrospective link juice where old 301's will now pass on the additional 15% based upon Google's new logic? I guess if there isn't a specific start date from where Google rolled this out, and it seems that it may have been running for a while, then it may be hard to pin down an exact answer...
Man, that's an excellent question Tony, and I'd love to know the answer. Hopefully we can put it to a Google rep at some time.
We would love to hear your findings on retrospective link juice...to be safe, we are taking it that it won't be!
My anecdotal evidence was similar to your own case study with one startling exception. When migrating one particular eCommerce store with more than 1000 unique products, blog and FAQ pages to https we experienced a loss in traffic for between two and four weeks. Measurably negatively affecting our actual sales. Once the http pages were re-indexed as https our traffic recovered and in fact grew to more than before the change. This was however expected by myself and I had warned the business owner negating any panic (to a point). On another site however we found out too late the site developers had not correctly implemented canonical URLs and the recovery period took much much longer and cost time and money in fixing the canonical URLs.
@Cyrus,
We are in the state to move from http to https. We have all our assets moved to https on staging and we want to take only one directory like /blog/ to https and all other sections on http LIVE. We want to see the crawler behavior, traffic loss, etc on blog. how much traffic losses and time period to recover blog traffic?
Is it a good practice to move one section of website to https? any drawback?
Should we move one section or entire website to https? What is best practice for moving to https?
Looking forward!
Best,
It should be fine to move your site in sections. By doing so you can often root out larger problems without crashing your whole site. Lots and lots of publishers work this way.
In the past year, I've watched at least 4 sites drop off a cliff as a result of redirects, can't say I've seen positive increases. On a granular level I've been spot testing redirects on the same domain, to exact duplicates, and I've never seen a direct swap in serps without a loss. Example: https://imgur.com/a/epUiX
Fascinating David - thank you for sharing! I think your experience is very typical of what a lot of folks experience.
Wow- thanks for sharing David. Painful to look at.
That good news for the SEo world as many companies were bit relcutant to take that 15% risk before. Now its a time for them to change to https.
But question arise for non-eommerce sites which they still believe they do not required SSL. How Search engines will treat their ranking and how it could effect their traffic.
What about if you moved to https over a year ago? All page rank (pages were all 5+) were lost and are still at zero today. Will these current changes help sites recover from redirects made that long ago?
Oh wow, that's a tough loss. If I had a client that went to zero after migrating to HTTPS, I'd look into other causes. It's unlikely this change will help out retroactively in this case. I'd look into making sure that the migration followed all the rules, and begin looking into alternatives for helping the site to rank going forward.
Cyrus, this is the first time that I read a post from you! This is a MONSTER POST! Really! THANK YOU VERY MUCH! I want to share you an experience. There's a page in the competition that has an optimized title, H1, etc. and he also has HTTPS. Another thing is that it has like 2 years in Google and he is in first page of Google when writing a special keyword in comparison to other competitors that have 7-10 years in the market and stay in page 3, 4, etc.
It's curious because his PA and DA are not so good as the other competitors, so I think, IMHO, that HTTPS has "something" to do with new SEO.
I was afraid of passing from HTTP to HTTPS. With this post I'm for sure doing it! THANKS!!!!!!
Cheers - thank you for stopping by. Best of luck with your SEO.
No, thank you! It's a honor to receive an answer from you! When I change http to https I'd like to share all of you the results :)
Does this mean that redirect chains no longer dissipate link equity?
I've always tried to get to the root and cut out the chains and I know that response time and efficiency of operation will mean we continue to eliminate redirection chains where possible. However, (from purely hypothetical intrigue) i wonder if this will reduce the prioritisation of cleaning up redirect chains if all links in the chain are passing on full link value as long as response time remains within optimal limits.
Thoughts?
Great question. My personal assumption is that short redirect chains are less likely to dissipate link equity.
That said, redirect chains are still a bad idea. Here's why:
Best to keep redirects as short as possible. Thanks for the comment discussion!
I was just thinking exactly the same! Redirect chains can be nasty. My take is that fewer hops = cleaner site (crawl) and less likelihood of chain breaks!
Hi Cyrus,
Thank you for your post, but if person is using both https and http version separately. so what should be the canonical URL for both website. same or different?
Typically, the canonical on both versions will point to the HTTPS version.
Hi Cyrus, great guide.
I wonder how you think this affects how Google handles rel=canonical tags?
We've always been told that, if honoured, they carry a similar (or the same) weight as a 301. Do you think this new logic of not diluting PageRank will apply here too?
Cyrus, I'm curious if you have any feedback on this question too. I've heard of sites using canonicals initially and then doing 301s after. Any experience or data around this strategy?
Nice! Very glad to hear that redirects pass 100 percent PageRank - There are a variety of redirection projects we'll be able to address without fear of loss (to some extent anyway). By making URLs more human-readable, I'm hopeful we'll be able to increase CTR for some of the folks we work with. This has been long overlooked for so many reasons. Thanks as always for taking the time to piece this together.
There's 2 issues which I come across regarding redirects:
1) When I ask a client's developer to change links to 301, they spend more time looking for articles saying that they don't need to than it would take to implement the 301. Regardless of how search engines treat the different types of redirects, we should still use redirects how they are intended to be used. If the destination page is permanent, use a blimmin' 301!
2) When raising an issue of internal redirected links, again I am met with articles saying that no pagerank is lost so it is not necessary. However, redirects are not instant and can slow down crawling. A significant number of internal redirects can create a lot of crawl waste which is good for no one.
Thanks for the article , and sorry for my poor English . The article confirms information received from other places but with many more arguments to take this into account . Thanks again.
Thanks for sharing such amazing SEO wisdom with us, Cyrus. About two years ago, I did an experiment on 301 redirecting some of my old blogs to some new domains. Back then a post by Dr Pete recommended against resorting 301 unless "your house is on fire." I am glad to state that all of those sites are doing fine. The whole point is if redirects are done to manipulate a search engine framework, it's unethical and Google is try to get their SE pretty darn close to acting like a super human, thereby detecting such unscrupulous behavioral patterns. One just can't afford to go overboard and do a bunch of 301 redirects with malicious intent and still expect roam skirt-free in Google's land.
Great write-up of these recent changes Cyrus. It makes perfect sense that Google would pass equity through 302s as a way to improve SERPs and not limit the visibility of those who didn't fully understand the difference between 3xx redirects. Similar to your experience with smaller websites, I've also noticed a boost in traffic after HTTP to HTTPS migrations.
I wonder what this means for 302 redirects based on geolocation? i.e. when you serve a localized URL with a 302 redirect after IP sniffing, etc...
I'm still waiting to see the love for my move to https. I suspect that I compounded the impact of the move by changing my WP theme around the same time.
Any updates on JS based redirects? How does Google treat them as they are not 3xx.
Coincidently, Branded3 just ran an experiment on this. The results seem to show that equity is passed through JS redirect. Read the post here: https://www.branded3.com/blog/seo-javascript-redirects-evidence-pass-pagerank/
@cyrus: Can you please tell from when you saw an uptick in traffic of the website that you mentioned in case-study. Our company redirected 5M pages from old domain to new domain with https a month ago, and there is a dip of 20% traffic and leads. I am wondering when this will be improved.
Changes on my small site happened within a week. When we moved Moz, it took a few weeks for everything to shake out. Unfortunately in the case of Moz, we introduced some additional problem at the same time as the migration which tooks months to uncover (we inadvertently created a mess with our URLs, but this is an edge case)
The challenge with larger sites is that it can take a long time for Google to process all those URLs.
The crux of the problem is that migrations never happen in isolation. There are always moving parts that are hard to anticipate. Happens to even the best SEOs. Life is... complicated.
Great guide and I think this is really good news and sensible - not just for SEOs but for small business owners, most of whom don't have a clue about which redirects to use and often find themselves using 302s due to the way things like domain control panels' web forwarding works. Always proceed with caution - and change as few things as possible would always be my advice.
Great article and good to know that 301 redirects are not penalizing that much anymore.
I would like to share my experience on this topic: I had one domain redirected on my website like Pulkit is saying. I did not seem to go down at the beginning but in a week I the website dropped in ranking ( I was doing some other changes, nothing major, so not 100% sure if it´s because of that )
Thank you!
I'm just curious to know whether the changes made in these rules are going to affect the subdirectory to subdoamin redirection or not. For one of my clients, I'm planning to move a blog from subdirectory to subdoamin. Will it affect my website's ranking and web traffic?
It is depend on what scale & purpose you want redirection. It is risky & you never know how search engine treat them. Test & do not assume just like Rand says earlier. If you found backlinks & traffic in your redirection pages then go for 301 right away. If you do not want to pass any juice then 302.
Any redirection will gives you traction in traffic stats but once Google rectify the code then you will get the previous stats. I hope this might helpful.
Great question Hardik, and one I didn't consider until now. In theory, the move should be slightly less risky today, but it is still not without risks. Subdomain redirects are some of the most unpredictable redirects you can do. We've seen many cases where rankings have actually increased due to increased domain authority+other ranking signals, and cases that went the other way (badly).
Best option is to try 1-2 URLs at a time and see what happens before doing a mass migration, if possible.
Thank you. I look forward to move Subdomain and will share a result with you. Cheers!
Hi Hardik, How did it go? I mean the testing, did you find it made your mobile rankings better or worse?
Thanks, much aprpeciated.
Great Article. Thanks for sharing.
We have eCommerce store on ylp.co.in, We use 301 and redirected to ylp.co.in/consumer folder
and now we want to remove 301 rule and /consumer folder
and back to simple site ylp.co.in
So, what to do in situation like this?
Please help.
Thank you.
If I understand your question, it should be easy.
1. Remove the original redirect
2. Put a new 301 redirect in place for each URL at ylp.co.in/consumer back to ylp.co.in
I can't promise you'll maintain all rankings (you could gain), but this is likely your best bet.
I am in the same boat as Rand. Still sceptical if this is true or not. If you guys could test this over a wider range of domains it would be great.
I'm also still very skeptical and won't be changing my approach just yet. Having said that, I am testing one or two things on a few different domains (changed a few redirects) but not noticed any changes in ranking/traffic yet.
Thanks Cyrus Shepard,
This is your 2nd article(1st was regarding fresh content) which I have followed read and liked.I would like to share one of my experience where in I had redirect 1 domain (keyword dot come) to one of my website, first it worked fine(increased keyword rank) but After someday it backfired (ranking dropped first and then out of ranking now again back to rankings), now i removed the redirection and now back to regular ranking table.
Regards
Pulkit Thakur
I had a similar experience. When did you do these changes?
Thanks for stopping by and giving us a read!
Thank you Cyrus. I have problems for understand 3xx rules. This guide is very important for me, but i think that I have to read and read and read this post ;)
Congrats!
Great question - we'll try posting to some Googlers!
But As per the John Muller Twitter Status on 9-Mar-2016 (Ref). Google Page rank is already dead. Why we are so much concerned about google pagerank when direction.
Is there any possibility that Google still measure pagerank as ranking factor in back END?
Hey Arpin - there might be some confusion between Toolbar PageRank, which was only for public consumption and depreciated by Google, and internal PageRank which Google still uses to rank pages. John Mueller was talking about Toolbar PageRank, which is indeed dead.
Also, is it okay to have plans of a military nuclear power plant for the building of nuclear bombs as the cover image? :D
Subtext is everything!
Hi Cyrus
Great guide to learn how and when to use redirections 3XX. As you well say, Pagerank is not the only or Most Important ranking signal, but if it is a factor to consider, especially if you have several pages that do not lead anywhere.
I did not know it is that before was lost both (15%) pagerank. He knew he could lose, but not so much
Thanks Cyrus for explaining the role of 301 & 302 in the world of SEO. I do have a query. One of my client redirected (301) all his Old/Invalid pages to homepage. I asked him why not redirect to relevant page, he said that there is no relevant page because the product is not available/the old urls are changed etc. So, what to do in situation like this?
I would suggest 2 solutions here.
1) Permanently delete the Old/invalid product’s pages, content and URL - When you have no closely product pages to redirect, you may choose to delete that page via using 410 status code. This will notify to Google that this page has been remove permanently & will never return.
2) Keep your Old page up - No redirects - Show Similar products to your users on the same old pages. I suggest to link your similar products & keep the old product URL if you get more inventory (so, no ranking loss).
I hope you find it useful.
Options are limited. The standard advice is typically to redirect those pages to the closest category page. If the category page is relevant enough, you might have some chance of preserving link equity.
I try to think of people who are visiting those pages from a link: what's the best experience for them? It could be one of several options:
Let us know how it goes.
2. Redirect to a category page >> You mean 301 redirect?
In our eCommerce store, typically each month 5% to 10% of our products become outdated. Up to now we used the option 1. (Leave the page up with a note). Lately our SEO guy deleted all the outdated pages from the last years (about 3000) and removed the URLs through the Search Console. So now these pages return a 404 status, and crawling errors are increasing in the Search Console.
After reading your post I think we should switch to 301 redirecting our outdated pages to a category page. Am I right?
Nice article. Question though. How about all the backlinks? As far as I'm concerned, the 3xx lose page rank as a normal link (it is not arguable that normal links loose some strength along the way), thus on a massive site that you can't just contact every webmaster to make a direct link, you're adding an extra hop to get to your site (especially from a backlink - a so known source of SEO value).
Plus, you're getting an extra http request that if you multiple by thousands on a popular large site might affect the latency and consequently the speed of the site/page - another publicly known rank factor. Any thoughts on this?
I understood that the LOST is even, but there is a lost, just it always the same no matter 301 or 302...
question: if I have website with www and it redirect to the same website just without www, did it considered 301 and I lose for that? (the same for http and https).
thanks!
Hi Cyrus,
We had many pages coming up for same keywords/ product as the same keyword was presented on these many pages, then we decided to create one page for that targeted product and redirect all existing pages to it. We use 301 redirect for the same. Will it effect our ranking or penalized.
So has anyone run a test on this? I can see how the redirects could be problematic, if the pages don't get indexed as https by google, relatively quickly, but this seems unlikely to me. I tend to see technical changes within 24 hours after a crawl, lately I've been lucky enough to get almost instant changes. IDK, am I missing something?
What a bull crap coming from Google... I redirected my DA PA 60 site with 360K links and many years in business from http to https and guess what, I lost 90% of traffic. Rolled back to http and my positions and traffic came back. Bunch of balonies... seriously... I can care less about goody goody perfect world of https and secure crap. I care about how much money I gain or lose. I know Google does not owe you anything, but don't lie to me that I will not see issues with traffic and sales. Unless I have intensives to switch to https without losing money, screw Google.... Go lie to moms and pops blogs...
On the other hand, considering "positive" signal. What if I enable https: on the entire domain, but not 301 redirect to https and keep http. Will Google consider it as scure "positive" signal, just like https sites?
Also another question. I can care less about inner pages since home page shows up for major keywords and 99% of the traffic comes from home page. What if I make home page http and all the references to inner pages to https. Will that be a better idea?
I hate how there double standards with Google all the freaking time.... Move on people. Google needs to hire better professionals and offer more intensives to web masters. Better diagnostic tools would do just fine. It's 21st century. Google keep losing to others, first market place, 2nd social, Mad Cutz left (thanks god!!!)...
It's not bull crap. If you do a HTTPS migration correctly wouldn't lose any traffic at all.
LOL... 15 years of enterprise level programming and 7 years making $$$ online on my own, I think I got pretty good understanding of how to do it "correctly". Seriously, my main keyword went down from top 10 to position 80. Why in the world Google influencing https at the cost of losing a lot of money for the web sites. I understand that site like wall mart will not see much of the problem, but I am not wall mart. I hate this honestly. Why would you make this shebang about perfect world, and at the same time - boom - go ... yourself if you do this we will treat https as brand new URL... No Thanks!
This is how I see it. There is MAJOR problem with moms and pops shops, blogs that are on wordpress and other "free for all" platforms... All these client/server platforms are getting hacked. Hosting providers getting hacked.
Wordpress is so simple to break... You create nice plugin, pass all the checks with wordpress and get it listed on wordpress.org, leaving this little detail so you can later hack it yourself. Make "web masters" download and install it. Later it takes no genius to get them hacked. Any hacker, some kid with little programming skills can do this. Easy get admin pass, login to someone's wordpress site and do whatever they wish. That's just one of the way people get hacked. There plenty of other "methods". I will never participate in hacking, but there a lot of idiots who will.
I will never in my life even think of client/server for SERPs.
Hacks got so sophisticated that these "web masters" don't even know what is going on, how they are being hacked, only Google bots see these hacks. Go to Google web master forum and search for "hacked". You will see what I am talking about.
I got hacked and taken out of index not even knowing what's going on. Not being able to see anything on live sites. Even wpengine with their "cool" tools were not able to get what happen. In between rolling sites back to before it got hacked I noticed that when I did "fetch by Google" the first time, I was able to see my meta titles started showing porn keywords, but 2nd time around, hackers were able to differentiate between IPs that are used by "fetch" and actual Google bots to feed different info. I mean I am talking about big games, not some cheap crap. Most people don't even know what I am talking about.... What pissed me off is Googles attitude about this whole garbage - "we don't owe you anything"... I get it, doing "hack" alert in real time is going to cost enormous amount of resources for Google without any returns, that's the only way I see it. Losing web masters one by one is not good for Google either....
I really think people who worked at Google marketplace were blind. How could you be the only first and losing marketplace to Amazon? Amazon is dictatorship and there no room for being creative. With Google, doing SEO optimization, link building to stand out and sell was fun, not any more. So stupid... Amazon does not allow you to use your skills in technology to advance. To Amazon you are just another flea, seller, no matter how big you get.
So that whole sheebang about SSL is like an emergency to cover up these f** ups. It takes enormous amount of resources for the Google bots to address each and every case. If SSL is good, site must be OK and from computing point, it's a lot easier to deal with it. So anyway, double standards again from Google and it drives me nuts how stupid this whole issue is now.
Double standards from wordpress. If you try to host your site on wordpress.org, there HUGE list of terms and conditions, where they say, if you have this plugin - f** off, if you host e-commerce site - see ya, why? Wordpress knows about these *** ups and they don't want to be responsible for crap, yet, about 25% of sites in the world are on wordpress or something. THAT IS HUGE for the platform that can be easily hacked.... So the only option if you want to host e-commerce site on wordpress paltform and that's what many do, is to load wordpress on your own cpanel and "open can of worms" and welcome hackers, exploits and such... Take a look at 0day and you will see what you can do these days with "ethical" hacking.... Good luck with wordpress...
Unless wordpress changes their game and begin to deploy instances to static HTML so it can be hosted on file cloud, nothing will change for better.... It is not possible to make it to anything with wordpress, unless it's hosted by wordpress.org and even with that, I believe they are getting hacked...
Unless something changes, there will be more and more sites that are labeled "this site might be hacked".. It's a mess...
Try to hack me now.... My sites are static, hosted on cloud. I use hosted check out. No web server - no hack. I can care less about https now. There is no way I will do this again unless Google comes to senses and treat http and https as the same.
I'm lost about the redirection
I have a .BIZ(main domain) site and it has been around for year.
I thought of changing to a .COM domain (which i parked in the same hosting)
I'm plan to change redirect .BIZ links to .COM links, so
when people click the link in Google search like the example below
eg:
abc.BIZ/page1 >>> abc.COM/page1
What shall i do? should I get another hosting and
redirect the old hosting to the new?
OR is there any other redirection method using htaccess?
Use this tool and place the code in htaccess
https://websiteadvantage.com.au/HtAccess-301-Redirect-Generator#heading-ToolResult
To many pages, so its difficult to do all pages. any other idea?
You would have to place a code like this in htaccess which would redirect all pages.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I have a query. I have set a 301 redirect from a URL that is not hosted anywhere, nor was hosted anytime in the past. The redirect is created at the DNS level. The URL it redirects to is hosted, has content on it and is very much the same niche. However I do not see the 301 redirect in Moz OSE yet. Do I need to host this URL and create the 301 in the htaccess? Thank you for the informational article.
For OSE to "see" the redirect, it would have to follow a link somewhere on the internet. Since the URL has never been hosted, it won't see it. Even if you hosted it, you'd still need a link pointed to it somewhere for a tool like OSE to find it.
Does that make sense?
In a larger sense, is there any particular reason why it's important that OSE see the redirect?
Hi, I am planning to have a NEW Domain and like to have a Domain SITE Redirect of my OLD Website to the NEW Website. Will the LINK JUICE/PAGE RANK of my OLD Site will pass on to my PLANNED NEW SITE.
Hey Cyrus, great article on redirects.
I have a client in a very tricky situation - they currently have three different websites using a brand name but cannot use the brand name anymore so have built a new website. I know you could 301 all three original sites (homepages,. categories and product pages) to the new site but it feels quite spammy to do so. We have suggested 301-ing the most valuable site to the new one and focusing on it, leaving the other two less valuable sites live (but not ecommerce) for the time being with a clear message to users on what has happened.
I was just wondering if anyone has had a similar experience and what worked for them?
Thanks!
Let's be honest, for most basic webmasters loss of traffic is the rule when migrating a website.
Few people are expert enough to make a 100% perfect migration.
Is it still best practice to redirect page by page? Or should we redirect the whole domain? We have a client with 4 websites of very similar content consolidating to one website.
Can any tell me i am in trouble -- Actually one of my website was generating url with prefix .html after some time i have changes all url using script by removing ,html and some protocol amendment. Now i have lose my home page keywords gone to 3 rd page which was in top 10 position. Should i remove disallow .html from robots.txt
If i have an internal server issue and i have the ability to redirect them then should we return a 302 error code or a 500 status code to the client (Google Bot) to retain google's trust that we can rectify this error on upcoming days?
I just changed a url on an article we updated and low and behold the pagerank was not passed. Tread lightly. Happyu to share the links if needed
Very interesting Cyrus, but this doesn't make much sense to me. How can Google say that 301's and 302's both pass 100%, considering a 302 is meant to be temporary?
So, with this update and using a 302, you can effectively double your pagerank when you remove the 302, then 301 that temp page back to the homepage. I doubt it.
Or better yet, build another page, use a 302, then remove the redirect, and now have 2 pages with equal juice? Makes no sense.
Then if 303's pass 100%, this new supposed update would get even more strange.
Google does a great job to get us SEOs to do their work from them. Heck, we built their index with GA, sitemaps, and disavows :)
For everyone else, here's a quick refresher for how 3xx "should" work: https://zadroweb.com/301-302-redirects-page-redirects-affect-seo/
...but looks like I might need to test this new update out!
Thanks for a great update.
I have a website keyword best espresso machine and want to change the hoisting service provider..if i change the hosting then will any effect on my pa or da?
thank you
Most likely not, as long as all the URLs stay the same and you don't take a hit on site speed. :)
Question for you: on my company, we put temporary 302 redirects when changes are done (like during 7-8 hours) then if redirect rules are ok, we switch them in 301.
I don't think it's a bad habit but having your feedback on that would be a +.
301 redirection can be done via several ways but the best way is to do through .htaccess. Although open source software like wordpress offers plugins for that. I recommend you do redirect for all corresponding pages. If they are not available, then do redirect to home or specific Category pages.
[advertising link removed by editor]
To me a lose on SERP's after switching to Https could be caused by the following:
My experience is that Google is quite slow at updating your existing (active) backlinkprofile.
A reason could be they want to wait and see if a link might return, because the linking site is just getting updated. (Matt is a nice and patient guy)
I assume that once you switch to https Google takes a look which links are still really there. If you have neglected your backlinkprofile for a while... ;-)
Thanks for a great article recently midre to https and your article was helpful
Totally agree with the changes. Recently (may) I migrated Blogger blog to Wordpress and I did 500+ 301 redirects to optimize permanent urls. Now my weblog have 30%+ organic traffic, same linkjuice and best rank on my principal keywords.
Thanks for the post (:
Great article as always :)
One thing I always think when there kind of changes happens, will it effect all geo servers or will it get to is just allot later on as always, after all Israel is a small country and updates from google rolling out allot later then in the US, so im thinking ahould I redirect without fear or wait a little...
What do you think this means for URL shorteners? Especially if you are using a branded domain? Can a social post using a branded short link (so not a blacklisted one) pass more ranking onto it's destination?
Thanks.
Thanks for the post
In the past I´ve noticed a small drop in traffic (I guess the 15% you refer to whenever we´ve added 301s.... If I understood correctly from your post, we may eventually see or notice a slight recovery from those 301s that caused a drop.
Is that likely to tbe the case? or would it only impact redirects included after Google applied the change in the way they handle and treat these?
Thanks
301 to those related and appropriate site if not then it does not make any sense redirecting to that specified destination
I've recently used 301 redirects for the migration of a client website from http to https. So far I have to register a 15% drop in some rankings. I hope things will get better in the coming weeks
I know this is OT, but I REALLY need to figure out how I can get my site to show up like this:
https://www.ThePrimeEffect.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-01-at-10.17.03-AM.png
I would really appreciate the help if anyone could tell me what this look is called and how to achieve it, thank you!
Sitelinks!
They're automated by Google and somewhat hard to control, but there are a few steps you can take. I found this resource to be helpful, you might too: https://www.bloggingspell.com/google-sitelinks/
thank you for the response!
Not to rain on the 301 parade... but lets get a few details straight:
I guess you may be confusing public pagerank with internal pagerank. The first is completely obsolete as you correctly pointed out. The second, however, is actively used by Google as one of many factors to rank pages.
Whoa! That's a lot of rain buddy :)
To echo Carlos, there's a huge difference between Toolbar PageRank, which was for public consumption and Google has depreciated, and internal PageRank, which is very much alive and well in Mountain View.
PageRank's influence as a ranking factor has diminished over the years as new ranking signals have popped up, but it's still very much part of Google's core ranking algorithm. And if you listen to Googlers talk about it, it remains a very big part.
As for your second point, that's actually a really good point. And your third point as well!
Thanks for the comment.
I will be buying an oldie but goodie website that ranks very high in search but desperately needs a graphic and content update.
I worry about screwing up the SEO traffic. That would destroy the reason for purchasing the site.
I intend to use Wordpress.
However, I believe this site was created in just plain HTML.
Typical URLs on the site look like this:
www.domain.com/topic.htm
www.domain.com/another_topic.htm
www.domain.com/hey_another_topic_here.htm
From reading this guide, it would appear that I should do everything possible to NOT change the URLs if I can avoid it.
Any other words of advice?
Hey Cyrus great peice as usual!
Regarding question number 1, if we are taling about low quality pages probably redirecting them is better than let them retun a 404 but the question is: to what page should you redirect them if there is not a corresponding better version of them on the site?
Regards,
Alessio
I think the answer is to build the better version of them by joining posts and adding more valuable content.
Regards,
Luis.
Hey Luis, great question. See the answer I just posted above: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo...
HI Cyrus,
Is HTTPS and HTTP Status Codes are same or different?
Like I found an article : https://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
But I didn't found any article on HTTPS status codes.
Please guide
Yes! They are the same.
I have a few thoughts on the questions:
1. What about low-quality or out-of-date content? In my opinion it is better to just let them drop off to 404 status. The idea is good content and luckily I don't see a lot of spun blogs anymore like was popular 7 years ago or so. If the content isn't relevant then you can always give it to someone else but if its just bad then drop it and your blog will be better off in the long run.
2. What practices do you use to speed up the process of following your redirects? For me I use social by tweeting etc. the new and old pages and I also will usually blog about it which gets picked up by feedburner etc. I would love some more advice on this though if anyone has quicker ways of doing it.
3. Ever have a redirect situation go bad? Not yet for me! Honestly not really an experience I want either. I have only done a couple of them for full site redirects and the first one I did a few years ago was completely seamless. The new url literally overnight took the place of the old url. It couldn't have gone better.
This article has greatly helped me understand a recent 2,000 page migration. I have done them before and experienced traffic drops for about 6-8 weeks. I worked on this migration for nearly a year and it went live June 5th. I was expecting a drop similar to previous migrations and only noticed immediate increases. The migration consisted of SSL installation and slight slug changes for all pages. The traffic started increasing since day one and has continued increasing for the past 2 months. This seams to be very accurate! I am thankful for the timing.
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for sharing 3XX redirection article and latest Google update of Redirection. I have a website and I have redirected some pages to another pages by 301 redirection and now website keywords ranking is slightly dropped.
Redirects are a BIG topic as we redesign, move and improve our web presence through our sites, here's my concern:
Your article has me feeling better about our pending merger of sites, TY!
You and the commenters say "Test" and measure; What do you do if the test fails?
Our recent investment in growth mandates we move forward.
TY
KJr
Good read as always!
nice article on experience with 301 redirect
Clears many things up. Thanks for being such a great source!
Hi Cyrus
How are you'll have to try new rules work for 3XX redirects. The truth is that I have always gone well for me as so far and I just noticed the changes
ya... God and Thanks
I do not redireccion new rules is sufficiently clear 3xx
I could not stop reading, thank you so much
Hey Cyrus,
thanks a lot for great coverage and opinions. We've been postponing move to https over and over 'cos of redirect loss + also here in Czech republic seznam.cz (very important search engine) had problems with indexing https pages correctly.
But few weeks ago seznam finally solved all the problems. And now no loss in Page Rank in Google? Great, great news! We will still wait a little while and see what Mozers & others will say, but in the end... we should be finally allowed to switch to https. Can't wait.
Cheers again for your post!
mbm
Finally 301 redirect has no role in SEO !