Update: In the months after this post was published, Google updated their algorithm so that 301 redirects no longer have any authority penalty. Many tests on Wayfair sites have shown that we can now 301-redirect pages without any ranking loss (assuming the page contents are the same, of course). In fact, this also means there is no longer any hit for migrating to HTTPS. It's worth noting that this is not true for 302 redirects, however. We still see rankings loss when 302 redirecting pages to a new URL.
At Wayfair.com, we conduct a lot of SEO tests. We're constantly measuring and evaluating our strategies, some of which were shared in our last post for YouMoz, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter. Sometimes, however, we stumble across what we call "accidental SEO tests." This typically happens when a bad code deploy unintentionally hurts our SEO, and we end up learning something useful from our mistake.
Tens of thousands of 301 redirects
One of our accidental tests involved regularly 301-redirecting large batches (i.e., tens of thousands) of product pages. On average, we found a consistent (and essentially permanent) traffic loss of about 15% for 301-redirected URLs.
In the past, Google has said a small amount of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect, which is the same as through a link. Now, for the first time, we can put a hard number to how much that loss is.
Structure of an accidental SEO test
Like any good SEO team, our product pages were set to use the name of the product in the URL. Furthermore, if for any reason a product URL was changed, the old URL was set to automatically redirect to the new one.
What we didn’t realize, though, is that our merchandising teams were also busy being good at their jobs, part of which involved changing the naming standards of products on a regular basis. Every change they made was good for the customer. But when the the naming standards changed, it caused thousands of products to change names. This, in turn, updated the URLs of those product pages, triggering a 301 redirect on every page.
For example, when updating for the purpose of having a consistent style, the merchandising team changed “barstools” to the more accurate two-word version of the product name, “bar stools.” Wayfair had over 8,000 bar stools, all of which 301-redirected to a new URL following the name change. Then, a couple of months later, the merchandising team found that they were getting better results by including the height of the bar stool in the product name, so they updated the product names again, which resulted in the product pages 301-updating once more to a brand new set of URLs.
This process of updating product names was being implemented across dozens of different product classes, with multiple updates per month. It quickly added up to a lot of 301 redirects.
Measuring the impact
After reshaping our URL logic to prevent the constant redirects, we realized that we had a great opportunity to find out exactly how 301 redirects affect organic traffic. Nailing down data was easy. We had the exact dates of the changes; groups of thousands to tens of thousands of pages, with tens of thousands of organic visits; and could compare those classes against others that we knew didn’t change to exclude the impact of Wayfair’s overall increase in organic traffic.
We found with surprising consistency that we had a drop very close to 15% of organic traffic for any product class that changed URLs. In our bar stools example, we lost just under 15% of organic traffic at the first change. When the URL changed again over a month later, we lost another 15%.
Every product class we looked at showed the same drop within one to two weeks of the change. Sometimes the drop was almost immediate (like with bar stools); other times, however, it was spread out over a couple weeks (e.g., area rugs, with over 30,000 products).
We did not see any evidence of recovery from the impact of the 301 redirects, even after many months. There was the appearance of recovery — class traffic levels eventually returned to where they started — but that was because our overall organic traffic was increasing across the entire site. We were still 15% below where we would have been without the redirects.
What’s particularly fascinating about this number, 15%, is that it is exactly the amount of PageRank loss Google described in the original PageRank paper. So our measured results matched theory with surprising precision. Perhaps the broader authority signals Google now measures follow the same logic for flowing through pages as they did in 1998? Or perhaps it’s just a happy coincidence.
What it means
We’ve always known there was a “small” cost to implementing a 301 redirect, but our accidental SEO test showed us that the cost is quite significant, and it becomes much greater with every hop in a redirect chain.
It’s worth stressing, however, that we are not saying that 301-redirecting any particular page is going to cost you 15% of your organic traffic. If you rank in position #1 for competitive terms, a redirect could drop you to position #2 or #4. That would cost you far more than 15% of your organic traffic. On the other hand, your page could be so strong that you may not not see any loss in rankings after redirecting it.
What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse.
While 301-redirecting a dead or changed page to the new location is still good practice, the best practice of all is not to change your URL in the first place.
Thank you, Brian. Very interesting. This article should serve as a warning to people who like to monkey with their URLs.
I am curious about what you or others do in these common situations.....
A) You stop selling a product and you have a similar, but not identical product to replace it. Do you redirect to the new product or announce that it is sold out and link to the new product?
B) You stop selling a product and you have no replacement. Do you redirect to a category page? Or to your homepage?
Hi Brian, really curious here, so based on these results, what strategy will you be implementing for your URLs, will you continue to freely change the URLs as your team sees fit, or will you create some limits, based on these findings
The first thing we did was fix the 301 logic so that the URL does not change when naming standards change. This way the merchandizing teams can continue to optimize the user experience as much as they want without any SEO impact. It's rarely ever worth a redirect just to get an extra keyword or two in the URL (particularly with the findings of our accidental SEO test on optimization saturation).
Great information! Logic and URL standards are important and should be assessed early on in a site to ensure consistency. Taking a rank hit because someone wants a different name can indeed be much more costyl.
Understood, thank you Brian!
@EGOL
Matt cutts recommended to use unavailable after meta tags when product is not available. Watch this video.
Hello Brian.
Grat post!
Do You have similar research for redirecting from http to https (only protocol)? How can it impact on website with a few million indexed pages (and high organic traffic)?
I'm really interested in the answer to this!
I also want answer to this. I am currently using cloudflare shared ssl. which just redirect http to https
Great info Brian. The average, based on what I read, typically hovers around 85-90%. This 85% hovers around the PageRank calculation from "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by the Google founders. It states:
"We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. "
Just thought about the same. In that case PR is still alive.
PR is dead.. SEO is dead.. the witch is dead!
Sometimes it's hard to ascertain, simply put... build a strong foundation with high quality.
I apologize in advance for maybe sounding stupid (I'm still learning), but could it have something to do with the fact that you changed thousands of common and popular terms with more complex terms?
I think it's unlikely. In some cases the change actually moved from a less popular term to a more popular one (such as barstool to bar stool), and often the added complexity (29" bar stool) should, in theory, actually benefit the on-page SEO by providing better topicality signals in high-value places like the URL (since a product page isn't going to rank for a search for "bar stool" anyway -- it's going to rank for a more specific longtail search).
If the change in term was the trigger, I would expect the data to be more mixed: cases where we changed to a more popular term would see a lift (or less of a drop), while cases where it could arguably have grown more complex would see the full drop. Instead we saw really consistent results regardless of what change was being made.
So basically, organic traffic dropped because of the change in site structure, not the content?
I believe it dropped because of the loss of authority signals. Some authority is lost in every 301 redirect, and this test suggests it amounts to 15% or so.
Makes sense, thanks.
Thank you for this article,
Where did you figure out that bar stool was more popular than barstool? I was curious since I'm in the middle of a redesign and stuck a bit with keyword density and naming conventions, so I did a quick keyword planner search and got this:
Showing Barstool having more searches preformed, only reason I did this, was because I am a bit cynical and believe a majority of people are little lazy when it comes to typing, and feel that space in the middle can be too much.
Avg. monthly searches ( Last 12 months )
Barstool 90,500
barstool 90,500
bar stool 22,200
Bar stool 22,200
Bar Stool 22,200
I'm curious to learn what other resources you use to determine keyword popularity since if there is more to use than the tools I've been using, I'd love to see some of that data!
Thank you in advance.
We look at Google's Keyword Planner and our internal search data (which is good both for learning how our customers might behave differently from average, but also sometimes gets us better data on smaller volume searches).
For the head term, two words wins out when you include plural (bar stools at 165k vs barstools at 22k). The head terms are useful for helping determine what language to use on the bar stools category page. We also look at more specific terms whose intent might be a specific kind of bar stool: counter height bar stool, leather bar stool; then more specific into 29 inch bar stool, or specific brand names. In these more specific searches we saw the two word version win consistently.
Ultimately we want consistency within the site and have to choose one way to go, which sometimes can be a tricky call. In this case, however, it was pretty easy to call it for two words (which is also the correct spelling).
Thank you for laying that out, While I was hung up with uppercase and lowercase, and even thought of plural versions, I failed to add that in there, which could of saved me this posting. However I'm glad I did post, since you did explain the process a bit further and will help just the same!
Thanks again and best wishes!
I have to ask - for sake of organic traffic and seeing these results, did you guys consider going back to /barstool instead of /bar-stool?
Interesting article but I thought would have been more useful if some advice had been offered other than "the best practice of all is not to change your URL in the first place." There are occasions when 301s are unavoidable and not just because people want to change url names on a whim, eg maybe a range of products becomes unavailable and you wish to redirect website visitors to another range. What is the best way of doing this so as not to lose out?
For my own website, I had more than hundred 301 redirects that had started showing error, we were not getting the right way to fix the issue. But finally, we got the solutions through the points mentioned in this post.
I have run into this many times with e-commerce clients and normally its when there is a need to redirect from a non seo friendly url to a url that the search engines like much more. Making the change and then seeing the massive amount of 404's in the webmaster tools is the next step, but the question has always been there how much is this affecting the organic volume. Now in this case is when we went from a non SEO friendly url to a URL that is SEO friendly but not having an answer to the client was the problem. The 15% mark makes sense as it does have an effect and also marketing is always evolving so this post also proves to help that area as well put more juice in the think tank when changing URL's to better suit the client and search tactics so that the change is only made once or a little as possible.
Thanks for the research and breakdown as this will help me give better answers to clients and fellow marketers when being asked what are the the benefits, and effects of implementing 301's.
I don't understand why organic traffic does not regain 15% again. I had always thought that Google, like any other search engines, discards the old URL before the 301 redirection after a few months and only takes into account the new one.
HI Brian we recently migrated part of our legacy website to a new domain.. In that case all old URLs had to be 301 redirected.. This was done to minimize the loss of link juice. Would you have suggested otherwise? thanks
Hey Brian.
Interesting case study, but I want to expand upon your conclusions, particularly the part bolded here: "What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse."
It's important to keep in mind that you were redirecting massive amounts of URLs, which most website owners aren't doing. Also, you were constantly redirecting URLs. Redirecting a huge amount of URLs all at once AND often can trigger a penalty. So I don't think the take away is "don't redirect URLs", but maybe "don't redirect thousands of URLs constantly."
There are a lot of scenarios where moving URLs to subfolders makes sense, e.g., moving blogs from the root directory to a blog directory. You might expect a slight drop in organic traffic after redirecting, but once Google follows that 301 you should be fine.
Let's also consider scenarios like HTTPS redirects. Google's explicitly said HTTPS is a ranking factor. Anecdotally, I've seen clients get a nice bump in rankings (1 or 2 rings up the SERP ladder) from redirecting their HTTP pages to HTTPS.
I just don't think it's fair to say 301s leak PR or authority or anything along those lines. But redirects definitely shouldn't be taken lightly.
I apologize if the article implied that we were usually chain redirecting: that was not often the case, but I called it out in the example because it highlighted how each redirect applies its own cost. The majority of changes were just one redirect hop.
I don't believe that redirecting large numbers of pages like this is treated differently than redirecting one page; in fact I think the larger numbers of pages instead gives us a strong statistical sample that lets us better measure the impact (and it's worth noting that it's a tiny fraction of pages on the site).
I think these results match up well to many SEOs' anecdotal experiences, but put a finer measurement on something we always knew was true -- it's also meaningful that it matches closely what Google has always said, that there's a small cost to a redirect.
I do agree that http to https is a different issue; however, my experiences suggest that there isn't a net gain to the migration: in fact, there is often a loss there too, though smaller than what was measured here (in the long term: in the short term https migrations often mirror the 15% loss the month after the change).
My point with HTTPS is that your conclusion "there's a 15% decrease in traffic after a 301" is taking your case study a step too far. We might be able to say "301 redirects cause a 15% decrease in PR", but not "301 redirects cause a 15% decrease in traffic." That conclusion takes the logic too far, and into error. It's a case of correlation being mistaken for causation.
Let's take another example of 301s causing traffic gains: moving a subdomain to a subdirectory. Moz has explicitly shown that moving their beginner's guide from a subdomain to a subdirectory caused a significant jump in traffic. That's because the benefit of the PR from housing the guide under their root domain outweighed the (potential) loss of PR through the redirect.
301s can certainly be beneficial, if the benefit from redirecting a page outweighs the initial loss of PR. Another way of putting this is, if the net gain of positive ranking factors from a 301 redirect outweighs the loss of PR/authority/link juice/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, you'll benefit from the redirect.
I'm certainly not saying that 301s are always a bad thing, and there are definitely situations like the Moz case where multiple factors combine in net positive ways. But when you have just one factor, just a 301 redirect from one URL to another, even if the new URL has superior SEO signals, there is a pretty clear drop in organic traffic as an effect.
It was really a nice topic really 301 redirect is very helpful to the SEO
good technical
Hi Brian,
I wanted to know did you guys try canonical tags. If so then did the canonicalization decrease the organic traffic?
Our pages all had canonical tags, and the canonical updated when the URL changed.
For example when your team redirected /barstool.html to /bar-stool.html they added canonical tag for /barstool.html page as </bar-stool.html> and also did a 301 redirection for /barstool.html to /bar-stool.html page.
Brian I had another doubt
Initially in your website you were generating /barstool.html link but after redirection are you showing the final redirected URL(/29-inch-bar-stool.html) in the search results in the website?
Thanks Brian your article is very helpful for me. I will make sure that I consider all the points you have talked about and also do the analysis after the 301 redirection.
Yes, all internal links automatically updated when the URL changed.
Thanks Brian :)
Great article Brian. I have seen many 301 redirects with eCommerce sites that I was part of and always saw a hurt in organic traffic at some level. However, most of the time the redirects I had to deal with were not from product name changes but from website domain migrations (which makes it hard to create a control when every page needs to be moved). I would be curious to know your performance over a longer period of time.
Have definitely seen the same on domain migrations. It's usually part of a larger branding effort of the company, but it goes to show that choosing a domain for a real company with growth is not a light matter!
This is interesting, as Google recently said that no value is lost anymore with redirects and hasn't been for a while:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-3xx-redirect-n...
It's not that I always trust everything they claim, but it makes me wonder if any other changes could have correlated with the drops, such as changes in H1s, etc. that I gather would have happened if the product name was changed.
@MorphNorth
I'm very confident the 301 redirect was the cause of the loss. When we fixed the logic, we stopped seeing the organic traffic dip after name changes -- and unrelatedly when we have to 301 redirect a page that is ranking for head terms, we immediately see the ranking loss. It's possible that Google is telling a very careful truth, and that PageRank is not lost, but many other authority factors that pass through links still are.
Hi Brian,
I agree with your test, as I have experienced these with one of my project, however its was not an Ecommerce site and hence it wont have thousands of pages with redirection, still I noticed drop in rankings of highly competitive keywords due to multiple redirects.
We are loosing authority with each redirect and I high recommend to implement direct redirect to avoid the loop and I know its also not possible to manage the loop for all websites.
Thanks. Keep testing.
Hello Brian,
Did your results improve after the latest change in the "Redirect" matter?
Regards
Thank you for this great post with useful information! A few months ago out team make changes in this product categories https://www.cosuri-pubele.ro/cosuri-gunoi-interior/cosuri-gunoi-inox.html , and for a few product url the serp position drop from 3 to 5. But the majority of new products url remain on the same position.
I choosed the same solution: the URL won't change when the product is renamed, so it's easy to work on the content without messing th URLs.
Thanks Brian for such an awesome article. Just a quick question. I am working with an ecommerce & are working with redesigning few of the products. What do you suggest:
1) Keeping the old URL active with a message "The product has been redesigned, Access the product by clicking below" - I am against this as I feel it will be a pain for the new users if the prices & designs are differing
2) A simple 301 redirection from old to new URL - I favor this to make it simple for everyone. Above all we can keep the URL same & avoid all conflicts.
Please not that it will be our second redirection (we shifted from doin to dotcom) & now some redesigned products will have another redirection.
Please suggest.
Thanks,
You should definitely 301 redirect to the new product (the link method is much worse than redirecting, since you lose 15% authority, plus have the remaining authority divided by all links on the page, and, as you say, it's a bad user experience).
Since I wrote this, Google has updated how they handle 301 redirects and there is no longer any authority loss for redirects. However, Google will still stop following redirects after too many hops, so it's definitely a best practice to always update old redirects to the newest location, so that redirects have only one hop.
Hi Brain,
Thanks a lot in making a decision. We are moving forward with keeping the URL same & 301 if needed.
Thanks,
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your insights in the original article. I would like to make a few comments.
1) Your wording suggests that 301s are bad for traffic. I think it is important to point out that it is actually the name change in the URL that does this, the 301 is only needed to preserve visitors and PR from the old URL. Not using a 301 would be much worse!
2) You mention redirect chains. I would recommend to avoid those. It's better to change existing redirects so that your old redirects point directly to the latest new URL, skipping the in-beween URLs and redirects. Did you already do that? I'm very curious to learn what the impact of such a change would be on your measurements.
3) You compare the 15% traffic loss with the possible 15% loss in PR value as it was supposed to be in the original PR formula. To me that does sound like a happy (or unfortunate) coincidence, otherwise PR value would have a 100% impact on your traffic ;)
1 - Yes, our findings were that 301 redirects are bad for traffic. Of course, changing the URL and not redirecting are even worse. But not changing the URL is the best solution, when possible.
2 - Chains definitely = bad * # of redirects. We had a couple of chains in our tests, but most of the time there was not a chain. Removing the chain should get you back to just the 15% loss, on average.
3 - It's also possible that the wider authority signals Google now uses have the same kind of decay factor as PR does.
Hi Brian,
What a great post, especially that it is based on real company and real data.
Being new to SEO I have a question though. At this moment we are migrating ecommerce shop from one CMS platform to another - we will do the 301 redirect. The domain stays the same but what will change is the CMS, design and maybe site structure. What we want to do as well is to improve the on-page SEO i.e. URLs, Title Tags, Headings, and add some more product description - but this means we will be affecting the Page level ranking factors.
Assuming we actually improve the on-page SEO (URLs will now be user friendly with product names in them instead of some random numbers; Title Tags will be defined properly and will include keywords; Heading H1 will match what we are selling and if possible match the keyword), the question is the following:
1) What will be the impact of such changes on our page rankings?
2) What should we pay attention to in order not to lose organic search traffic?
3) Would such changes have any negative effect on Domain Authority?
4) Do you recommend keeping longer url structure like domain/category/product or keep it shorter domain/product (I believe the second option is what you use in Wayfair website)
Cheers,
It sounds like you're making a lot of changes at once -- so how it impacts rankings is dependent on the quality of all of those changes (and if something goes wrong, you won't know which change caused it). That said, with the changes Google made to 301 redirects, you shouldn't need to worry about that part of it.
I'd recommend a domain/category/product URL structure with proper canonicals. When switching to a new platform, always keep an eye on canonicals, noindex, and robots.txt -- these are the most common "oops we lost all our SEO traffic" things that can happen.
One other thing I'd keep a close eye on is that you say you'll use a new site structure -- which I interpret to mean your hierarchy will change. The way authority flows through a site's internal link hierarchy is a surprisingly important part of ranking for established sites with decent links. Just be sure you aren't adding tons of global links (in the global nav, or footer).
Also always worth stressing: when you make tons of changes at once like this, while there's the possibility to get something wrong and not be sure what needs to be fixed, there's also the possibility that you'll improve lots of things at once and see a very nice rankings boost in the month or two following the migration.
Great Article, good!
thank you
This is so interesting. Recently we have come to make a change to show the domain without www. and add the products to a subdomain. 301 receive alert too low and our SEO considerably
what about redirection about crawl errors? How to redirect the 404 errors? Where to redirect them, to Homepage or sitemap?
Quite interesting calculation.
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@brian wood: This is not related to the 301s I guess, but I wanted to bring this to your attention. Is the no-caching of pages such as https://www.wayfair.com/End-Tables-C414604.html intentional or a bug? I remember seeing your cached versions until a few weeks ago, then they disappeared. Still indexed, but not cached. If it's intentional, why and how you guys did it?
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the very informative article. We are in the process of a website migration.
1.) What would you suggest as the best method for redirecting the old URLs to the new URLs? (least damaging to organic traffic)
2.) If a division of our business has closed, what would be the best method with these pages?
a) redirect to the home page
b) 404
c) redirect to page informing that we no longer offer this service
d) other suggestions
Thanks, I look forward to your response.
In the case of a site move, there's no choice but to 301 redirect the pages (Wayfair was once over 200 different sites, so we've been through this particular pain!). Just make sure you're 301 redirecting each page to the corresponding page on the new site -- don't let someone lazy just redirect everything to the new home page.
If a division has closed, I recommend 301 redirecting all of those page to a page stating that you no longer offer the service (or if it was just one page, then update that page with the message). In this case you just want to preserve most of the authority from any links pointing to those pages, while also communicating to users that you no longer offer those services. A 404 loses any SEO value from earned links, while a redirect to the home page is confusing to users.
Hi Brian,
Thanks so much for that feedback. We do need to 'cull' a couple of pages as we are condensing the site. There are some irrelevant pages on our current site which we no longer want and therefore there is nowhere to redirect these pages to. In this case, what would be the most effective way of dealing with this?
Thank you
Thanks Brian., I am revising posts on 301 since we face a similar problem to the one you describe and out url builder simply takes the product name and transforms it into a url. Your input here is very interesting (though not the best news! for us this time!) Thanks
A brilliant post, I try to apply it to my web fishing, hopefully a good result for us, thank you very much
Great article I read. But here in my case migrating only a few thousand posts (roughly 10k vs our full library of close to 1M pages) — how much will Google penalize us for losing that historical content? Is there a way to pull it over but not include it on the site map? Is that better or worse?
Hi Azeem,
Here is what you can do:
- Place a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL.
- Remove the old URL from the xml sitemap.
- Include the new URL in the xml sitemap.
Here is a little trick:
- Place the URL's you have moved in a separate xml sitemap.
- Add this sitemap to Google Search Console.
- This way you can keep an eye on its indexation.
If you want even more monitoring? If the URLs you want to move are in a separate directory, you can add these directories as 'sites' (example.com/old-directory and example.com/new-directory) to GSC. You can collect data for a while about the old URLs before moving and compare the performance on the new location afterwards.
Best,
Astrid
Great. Thanks for your response.
I've seen the exact same thing with a client who kept changing their mind about the URL Name. The first site ranked #3, the second #4, and the 3rd #6 - All because they believed that 301 would pass all the juice through...Needless to say I'm not letting anyone do that again!
Congratulationes for your really interesting article. What i found more interesting is that the URL chang doesn't bring a increasing number of visits. I thought when you make those kind of updates in URLs you might loose some vistis due to the 301 redirect (you confirm is 15%) but this change should have a positive effect (at least more than a 15%) I am really surprised with your confirmation there is no such a big and positive effect. And is really good to know. Thanks! :)
Hi Brian, I own a trophy and awards website and found this very helpful - thanks! In the old days, our platform created urls automatically - so the names were totally unrelated to the sections or items. For example, we have pages on our site that have names like "noname48.html" - horrible. Surprisingly though, some of these pages rank fairly well - like #10 on Google and #3 on Bing. Some are important section pages for us.
We have been advised to change the names to match the content and implement 301's - which I completely understand. Question though, do you think the 15% drop is worth it? The next 2 months are very slow for us (seasonal business), so it would be a good time to do this. But the fact that the impact is not temporary scares me a bit.
Thoughts?
Many thanks!!
Neil
Did the copy of the product description change as well? I mean, the URL changed to be more descriptive or narrow, but how about the description of the content, was it adapted to better describe the product?
The decrease of traffic could be influenced by having a narrower "keyword" (ie. 29'' bar stool vs barstool which I assume has higher search volume).
It would be interesting to know the effect on conversion rate as well, if the product page is more descriptive, it could increase. If this happens, then "sacrificing" a 15% on traffic would be worthy.
good post www.iiimltd.in
Just as an update: with the changes Google made to 301 redirects over the summer, we can now 301 redirect without any ranking or traffic loss at all! In addition to fixing all the issues listed in this article, that also means that we can now move sites to HTTPS without taking a traffic hit.
Thanks for the update, Brian. Are you referring to Google's announcement (Gary Illyes statement in July) about treating all redirects equally? Are you saying you've now seen results to confirm that this is happening?
Yes, and yes. We've done a bunch of testing, and are able to change URLs with 301 redirects without ever losing rankings. Among the many delightful things about this is the fact that sites can now switch from http to https without any rankings loss -- which we've also tested, and works great (a year ago when we tested there was a 15% hit, though it did eventually recover to a smaller long-term hit -- but still painful).
Thats great news, Brian. It seems to contradict some of the things I heard at BrightonSEO recently tho. In particular, the findings presented here https://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/11-things-didnt-know-links-redirects/#redirects-not-equal Hopefully more test cases will emerge to confirm what will be good news for us all.
We also tested 302 redirects and they definition did NOT work like 301s -- 302 redirects still lost substantial rankings, but our tests (and https migration) showed no loss from 301 redirects.
It's really make sense. Thanks to share it.
Fantastic article Brian - thanks for the info and all your answers on these comments. Make them even stronger of an argument. All and all I agree, best case scenario - no more loss than a link. Which still means an extra hop, extra dissipation.
I was just wondering, how long did it take for you to retrieve back the traffic? Ie: after you removed the high amount of 301's. It would be great to have a figure.
Thank you,
Hi Brian
Sorry if it's not the first time someone asks this question, but what do you think the effect would be when editing an existing redirect instead of creating a new one? Or even deleting the initial redirect and creating a new one?
Hi
great post. my question is that if the 301 redirect from none www to www would also be a bad practice and if so how would you recommend to do setup your .htaccess none www to www ?
Thanks
Fantastic post, Brian. Really interesting to hear about the correlation with PageRank loss. Do you mind answering how long ago this "accidental" test was done?
is it good if I redirect a URL to a new one which includes trending keywords?
Really good info. But I guess when it comes to migration, everything is a balance. But one thing that could help out marketeers is to run through internal 301's on a quarterly basis, as i guess everyone is busy enough building content, links and work processes.
A common pitfall is multiple 301's. So i would say it is a balance of making sure there is only 1 redirect, and then also (when possible) correct false links.
History has proven that only accidental findings give the best results. :)
Thanks for sharing the article with us!
Best,
PopArt Studio
Hi Brian, first time congratulations for your post and second time I would like make a question:
all redirections must be do it in .htaccess file from your server?,
thank for sharing.
That's an interesting one. Thank you for help with 301 redirects. ;)
I suppose that external links weren't updated?
Hey Brian, interesting article! Could you share some more info on this case? The 301-redirects could very well be the cause of this drop in organic traffic, but what's the period in which this accidental experiment was conducted? Can we rule out Google Updates?
And did you check (and can you share) how your rankings were performing before and after? I think Igor (1st comment) has a valid point, there may have been a shift in targeted keywords as well.
The accidental test ran for over a year, though the changing of naming standards had really ramped up in the six months prior to our discovering it. Most of the examples we examined were from a 6-month period, and there were multiple changes each month, so we can pretty safely rule out algo updates.
Thanks for your reply Brian! And what about a shift in targeted keywords (the 2nd part of my question)?
I think it's unlikely to be a factor. The only changes to the page were the URL and the headline, and more often than not the change is something that I would expect to improve keyword targetting (29 inch bar stool as opposed to just barstool for a product page, or area rug instead of just rug). But whether the keyword targeting could have arguable improved, or arguably worsened, the results were very consistent in every group of redirected pages.
Nice work. But I have a few questions.
What happens in a "control" situation? Were there any controls available?
Try changing the product name in such a way that does not require a 301.
Surely that's do-able, right?
Are there any such instances in the data?
If not, I think a few experiments are called for. Try a controlled experiment where some large batch of URLS are changed using the methodology described here,with a similar sized batch of URLS that also change, but the anchor text linking to these pages is changed as well. For this to be valid, it would have to be repeated a few times, with different batches, in a more controlled, statistically valid scientific methodology.
Surely others have thought of this already. If so, their results deserve discussion.
I look forward to an update on this interesting finding.
In a way we do now have a test group where names changed but there was no redirect (in the original test, which was accidental, the control group was all the pages where nothing changed).
After discovering the issue we changed the way the code works so that when the product naming standards are changed, it no longer updates the URL. We have not seen any measurable organic traffic loss in product groups that have had the names changed since then, and at this point we have many dozens of examples in both test groups. I think the 301 is the clear culprit.
I had a client recently do this to themselves inadvertently by changing their CMS.
Don't just 301 the links... go in and correct them so they're pointing at the correct URL, so you make sure you're getting the most out of your backlinks.
I just create a website, and to get backlinks is quite difficult for me.
and this is not instant.
there are some guidelines that I learned, very confusing.
Can you give simple tips for this ...
Hey Brian
Super interesting. Can i ask did you correct the internal navigation? Or did internal navigation remain the same as it ever was and linked to the first URL in a chain of 301s?
Cheers
Marcus
The internal navigation did automatically update when the URLs changed.
Which of course is really interesting and we have to question why this is happening and is it transient.
I am guessing all of these pages don't have tons of inbound links. So, they are ranking on internal page rank distribution. Which, given the updates to the internal navigation, sitemap etc should normalise over time.
Would be super interesting is a follow up at 3, 6 and 12 months to know whether this is a transient factor whilst the value of these pages is recalculated. Whether over a longer period the improvements lead to a net gain in traffic.
Great post. :)
Across the thousands of products in each group, there are actually quite a few links (usually in the hundreds), but certainly most pages don't have external links.
As far as we can tell, the traffic loss remained over time; however, Wayfair's organic traffic across all pages has increased rapidly over time. I used control groups of products that didn't have changes to establish a baseline traffic increase and with that it appears that the 301 groups didn't recover; however, once we got to 5-6 months out the data was very noisy and accurately measuring a 10-15% difference grew very difficult (different control classes' traffic grew at rates that could be more than 15% different).
Yeah. Super tough to measure. Seems that the old rules from 15 years or so still ring true today - don't change URLs unless you absolutely, positively have to. Take care. :)
Good Analysis. Redirects 301 have worked fine for me till now though.
Am I right in saying that this is creating a redirect chain? What would happen if the original redirects were fixed to go to the final URL version?
Some of these (like barstools) definitely created a chain. What we saw was about a 15% drop in organic traffic for every 301 hop, and for examples without chains just the 15% loss. So if we made the barstool example just one hop, we'd expect to see just the 15% loss.
If the website is just too large to make a complete 301 redirect map possible. In that case,we have to look to web analytics and Webmaster Tools to help prioritize the URLs on which to focus.
Great info here. Seriously I think every SEO in the world has under-estimated loss of equity from 301's. It just becomes too easy for us to get comfortable with the standard "10% or less loss of link equity." This article is super relevant to some work that I'm doing right now. I'm executing a full URL migration for a client's website. In this case - we've updated the site's architecture and provided a new taxonomy and are 301'ing all the old URL structures to the updated ones. This article has reminded me to pay close attention to what happens after the migration is complete. Thanks again!
Hi Gaetano,
We are also in the process of a website migration. Do you have any tips for executing a full URL migration? Thank you.
I think if the Redirect remains within a certain limit it does the job, But if it goes like thousands of 301 redirect. These kind of drop of not unusual.
In your case, there was one structural issue with its creating of 301 redirects. Even with a minor clerical mistake by product management teams ends up with 301 redirect. Which makes number huge and highly impracticable.
Hey Brian, you provided so much quality information, it’s amazing. Thanks a lot for sharing this....
Hi Brian
Very nice post.
Do you think implementing 301 would drop the link juice?
Perhaps I am not reading this correctly but it seems to me that you are saying that each time you updated you added another hop in the redirect. That would definitely cause problems but should also amplify the effect.
The timing of this article is absolutely perfect for me. We implemented a 404 page and put in 301 redirects for the links that had some equity and I'm trying to determine what, if any, value we've gotten from that before we roll out 404s across the rest of our ecommerce sites. Thanks for the post!
I think we all knew this was the case as real world data definitely suggests it. Had to laugh at this article & Matt Cutts video though: https://searchengineland.com/google-pagerank-dilution-through-a-301-redirect-is-a-myth-149656
Well, in this case someone thought that a 301 had *more* dilution of PageRank than a link. Cutts was just pointing out that they were the same, not that there was no dilution at all. And we're seeing in this test case that the amount almost exactly equals what the PageRank paper would suggest, which is kind of cool.
Right.. Not more as you lose PR with every link but I remember reading studies that there is a decay factor as well with redirects vs direct links. In the end it shows the danger of changing a URL cause there are real business impacts to consider.
I'm wondering if the hit in traffic would be temporary if you stopped making redirects from here on out? Perhaps after a while google would see that you were just going for specificity which is ultimately helping users, and if there were no more redirects after the 29" barstool level of specificity, you would eventually see a boost in traffic. Traffic could become more spread out by category and seem lower, but then in the long-term a general category like barstools could see benefit. Great post to spark some discussion and make improvements. Best of luck to your team and Wayfair to bounce back from this issue!
Most of the categories that were changed only had a single 301 redirect (most were not redirect chains, like bar stools was). We didn't see any difference in behavior between chains and non-chains (other than chains added an extra cost for every hop).
Brain, does this also apply for redirection from /bar-stool.html to /bar-stool (redirecting the html extension to root) ?
The specific URL change shouldn't matter: any 301 redirect to a new URL should, from my experience, work the same.
Thanks Brian.
This is helpful for someone who is planning a new site structure however what is the solution for those who have already implemented multiple 301 redirects.
If we remove the redirection, it will result into 404 pages (for older pages).
You already did /barstool.html -> /bar-stool.html -> /29-inch-bar-stool.html and lost around 15% traffic each time.
How did you recovered from this?
Brian, does this also apply to .html to non .html redirections such as /bar-stools.html to /bar-stools ?
Wonderful, This is very insightful article about the 301 redirect.
I don't think there is any mention of rankings in your post. What did that look like?
Also assuming you guys changed your URL because your team stated they performed better, did you guys change your title and H1s? Descriptions? I don't see how users perform better from reading the URL, therefore they must've changed title, internal linking taxonomy etc.
301 redirects can't have this major of an impact in terms of rankings. Or at least shouldn't.
In addition to the URL, the headline of the product page changed, and the internal links updated to link to the new destination. So the only on-page change was the name of the product in the headline on the product page.
We don't track rankings for all our product pages, which would be impractical with our number of products. We have a small sample of around 1k product keywords we track rankings for just to keep an eye on how the page template is performing and to test changes, but that isn't useful for tracking changes like this.
I can say, however, that this test closely matches other anecdotal experiences we've had 301 redirecting large pages where we do have keyword data, and in some cases the drop was much larger (ranking #1 for a very competitive term, and the redirect drops us to #6, losing more than half of traffic). We've seen similar long-term effects from site migrations, or blog migrations.
Thanks for your reply. This is definitely interesting and something to keep in mind when companies decide to change URL structures.
Tests like these are always good reference points.
This is super excellent. Glad that your data backs this up. I've done 3 site migrations in 2015 with a complete name change and saw similar results.
I'd been going by the adage that you only lose 1-10% of domain authority/PR with a 301 redirect change, but in the wild in 2015 the effects are larger and last longer. I had read here and elsewhere that rankings should restore after a few weeks or so, but the effects in my 3 cases have lasted 90 days or more.
I do think it's not a terrible plan on Google's part as they want to create some disincentive for changing domain and URLs names frequently - but I've seen much more than the SEO community has put out.
Like you said, I think a lot of it it does depend on the domain strength and ranking power. If the domain ranks at the #1 spot and beats out competitors by a mile, then the change probably won't be as much. But if the domain is holding on to its first page rankings by a hair, then any changes will cause some fluctuations.
If it helps anyone, I basically made the same mistake about 3 years ago, or well our team did and I took the blame for it, for the sake of blaming someone I just elected to take the heat...
Regardless our results were very similar on both e-commerce and non-e-commerce sites.
There were a few other factors that have come to light over time as this same test has been put in motion several times since the first error (opportunity to learn)...
I realize this is very general and brief, but I want to keep it straight forward and simple, and @Brain
Thank you for posting this, finally I don't feel like the only person that has had to go down this particular road...
Very interesting article Brian. Are you sure that the crawler passed in every backlinks of this page?
Great article, sent me off to test my 301's and caused me to stumble across another problem that had been hiding on a clients website.
Thank you!!
I did not know the cost to implementing 301 redirects, interesting article.
Thank you.