Are these redirects damaging my rankings
-
Hi, just been going through my google webmaster tools and i have found a number of soft 404 errors and was shocked to see these redirects going to my home page.
| URL | Response Code | Detected |
| --- | --- | --- |<colgroup><col style="width: 45px;"><col style="width: 80px;"><col><col style="width: 120px;"><col style="width: 90px;"></colgroup>
| | 1 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity | | 7/25/13 |
| | 2 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1068-coronation-street-nick-proposes-to-leanne | | 7/28/13 |
| | 3 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1086-coronation-street-fiz-nearly-gets-tyrone-in-trouble-with-kirsty | | 7/28/13 |
| | 4 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1155-coronation-street-kylie-considers-telling-david-about-her-affair | | 7/28/13 |
| | 5 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1157-coronation-street-fiz-is-worried-when-kirsty-pays-her-a-visit | | 7/28/13 |
| | 6 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/750-actress-hilary-duff-is-sued-over-car-accident | | 7/25/13 |
| | 7 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/843-what-your-dogs-bottom-scooting-behaviour%E2%80%99-really-meansI would have thought that the developer who upgraded my site would have either had these blocked or directed them to the correct page. i am now guessing that there are going to be hundreds of these appearing and would like some serious advice.normally with old pages i would have them going to the relevant articles or pages but it seems the developer has redirected hundreds of these to my home page, which i guess is going to confuse google. i would like to know if this will confuse google have all these pages going to my home page.i have tried to find out where the developer in my site has redirected the pages as they are not in my htaccess file, i use joomla.can anyone let me know what i should be doing with these to solve the problemmany thanks | -
thank you for this, will do this now, many thanks for the great advice
-
You have a robots.txt file in your root - http://www.in2town.co.uk/robots.txt >> add
Disallow: /staging1/
In Webmaster Tools go to Google Index >> Remove URLs >> Create a new removal request >> enter http://www.in2town.co.uk/staging1/ >> Continue >> set Reason to remove directory >> Submit Request.
For canonical refer to http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I hope this helps.
-
that sounds like a great solution, can you explain how i would do this, as never done this before
-
Why don't you put /staging1/ in your robots.txt, then remove that directory from index in Webmaster Tools. Backing that up with canonical tags in case any similar slip through the net.
-
the problem i have is, these upgrade files like this one
staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity
this is a live article, so google is seeing the live url address which is http://www.in2town.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy/gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity
and then they are seeing the upgrade file which is
www.in2town.co.u,/staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity
all the upgrade files have been redirected to my home page, not sure this is right.
-
I'm not a Joomla expert but if you have nothing in your .htaccess like 'ErrorDocument 404 index.php' then Joomla is probably handling the error redirection internally in maybe 'templates/system/error.php' or 'sef.php'
I understand settings in these files can override your .htaccess as well.
You can have any page as the 404 page as long as the header response is 404 - that is all Google needs to know. The potential downside is user experience - I normally would suggest a custom 404 page with your menu system, or 301 permanent redirects to suitable alternatives (possibly homepage), as you suggest.
Webmaster Tools is not the best place to check current 404s. I would do some live checking using say Screaming Frog and spot check the exact header responses using Fiddler. I've seen some strange header codes coming from a problematic Joomla setup.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Subdomain redirect
Hey guys, I was thinking about creating subdomains for one of my websites. I want to divide my website in different subdomains (blog.[site].com / directory.[site].com / etc.) but I'm afraid that this will negatively impact my rankings. My blog for example has a lot of supporting content for my products and services that are primarily hosted on the homepage. Have you guys ever created subdomains at a later stage of your website's existence? What kind of impact did you notice? Would you recommend it? Thanks a million!
Technical SEO | | Nizar.1 -
Not ranking - Scarped content
Hi, I have a problem with a website, that never compe up with before. The website is: https://www.enallaktikidrasi.com It has a bunch of excellent articles, good enough on-page SEO and a medium backlink profile. However, it is ranking just for very very few keywords. The major problem is that there are original articles that searched by their title won't appear in top100 results but they will appear in other websites that scapre them (even if they give a backlink to our original article!) Also, the website has good rankings in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google. There are keywords ranking in #1 in Bing but nowhere in top10 pages in Google.... I am guessing for 3 issues: 1. Majestic shows a very low trust score (just 13). However, the website has not got any kind of penalty in the last 3 years. 2. There are many scarpers. The odd is that scarpers with no real value outrank our content. (Scarpers with almost zero backlink profile) 3. We ran Sucuri on website as there were a large bots attack. Is there a correlation between it bots attack and Google results? (but why not in Bing and Yahoo too?) It seems like Google underestimates the website when indexing websites for some reason. Moreover, some of the articles are really the best around but the keywords they are targeted are not either within the 30 first pages... Any help?? Thanks..
Technical SEO | | alex33andros0 -
Redirecting non-www to www
Hi all, I recently ran my first diagnostic test with SEOmoz and was alarmed to find my company's site has over 8,000 cases of duplicate content, virtually all of which can be attributed to separate domains, www vs. non-www. So after some research I found that this can be solved easily using .htaccess. However I found a warning on another site that if my site has already been indexed by Google without the www, there could be side effects like a loss in PR. Can anybody tell me how to find out whether my site falls into this category? I do have access to Google Webmaster tools but I can't find anywhere that tells me how my site's been indexed. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rylaughlin0 -
301 redirect of a subdirectory
Hello! I am working on a website with the following structure: example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. The page "example.com/sub1" does not exist (I know this is not the optimal architecture to have this be a nonexistent page). But someone might type that address, so I would like it to redirect it to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. I tried the following redirect: redirect 301 /sub1 http://example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. But with this redirect in place, if I go to example.com/sub1, I get redirected to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/sub2/sub3 (the redirect just inserts extra subdirectories). If someone types "example.com/sub1" into a browser, I would "example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3" to come up. Is this possible? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
301 redirects on Windows server
Hi, We are soon moving www.ourumbrellaorganisationwebsite.co.uk/oldsubsidiaryname/index.aspx AND www.differentolddomainname.co.uk to just www.ourumbrellaorganisationwebsite.co.uk (an existing site which will no longer have the old subsidiary name sub section). How do we do the 301 redirects on a Windows server? Helicon has been suggested but I don't know it. I know we need to 301 redirect 'old' pages to the equivalent new ones, but is it a problem to do all of the old pages (there are lots) or should we just just do a few? is there ever a downside to doing individual redirects for an entire old site? Also, once the 301 redirects are in place from the old domain, is it possible to let the old domain expire and if so, at what point? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0 -
Why sudden change in rankings?
I have been working on a domain for site which has only been up for a few months. I have mainly been working on building trust and authority for the site, with only a few links to my keyword phrases, which I was saving for the end, and concentrating on good quality non-spammy type links. It was progressing nicely until last weekend when I went from the first page on Google to the 3rd and 4th pages. Was there some kind of update?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0