Reversing 301 Re-Directs
-
What's your philosophy on reversing 301 redirects? Does it depend on how long the redirect has been in place? Is it okay to implement a 301 redirect and remove it if the desired results aren't achieved?
Also, what about multiple 301 redirects and removing those? I'm working with a site that has several 301 redirects in place and there's no definite knowledge as to when these were placed. I know there's always a danger and the possibility of unintended results when moving these around. I'm just curious as to what others' experience has been with placing and removing these either within a short period of time or over the course of as much as a year.
Thanks in advance!
-
301 redirects can easily be reversed as needed. Think of it as call forwarding. You can cancel call forwarding or even re-forward a number.
Depending on the importance (i.e. PR) of the particular page which is being redirected, search engines may update their records in 1 hour or it may take several weeks. Sometimes the redirect goes smoothly, and other times there could be some bounce experienced, but things should settle in after a month.
301 redirects are a very natural part of the internet. Search engines are designed to handle them well.
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
-
batch 301 redirects with an external tool
Hi, I am migrating my e-commerce to another platform of a internet company in Brazil (Tray) that has no way to redirect 301 urls in batch, I also do not have access to files and ftp of it. Anyway, as I have hundreds of urls, I would like to know if there is any way to do batch redirects with an external platform tool? Thank you very much in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | didi090 -
301 Redirect - Rank Recovery Examples?
Hi All, I recently did a 301 redirect. Page to Page and the notified google via its console. Its been 6 days since. The home page and one other high traffic page swopped out with the new domain on google search index with 3-4 drops in ranking for each. The rest of the sites pages have been indexed but still reflect the old domain when searched. Recently today my home page dropped even further to the second page of google index for the specific keyword. Can you share similar experiences and how long it took you to recover rank fully? and how long for all pages to swop out on google search's index? Regards Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
301 or Canonical - Ecommerce Site Question
We are making a change to our Navigation and this includes having to change the URL structure of a few pages of our site. Due to issues with the CMS (that are out of my control) we are unable to keep the current URL structure of two of our highest ranking pages. Our site is an E-commerce Site The Structure is changing from..... www.domain.com/page/highrankingpage <----OLD PAGE RANKED WELL to www.domain.com/category/highrankingpage <----NEW PAGE Generally I would have 301 'd this page but I found out that our Tech team added a Canonical to this page instead....(showing the high ranking page to the Search Engines) and on our site the visitors are able to browse the website getting the new page. BOTH PAGES ARE BASICALLY IDENTICAL (Same Content) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical# Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMcMullen0 -
Reversing the bad effects of a problematic 301 redirect
I have a previously very strong ranking page that is now omitted from the SERPs, but only for one specific keyword phrase. I think I found the reason, which I'll explain, and I hope I can hear some confirmation of my theory and a way to correct it. Let's use the following made up domain and keywords: Political blog SiteA.com had a few news articles about "Blue Widgets" (like 10 out of 10,000 pages). They became exceedingly popular, so on SiteA.com we created a reference-type page about "Blue Widgets" and in the news articles we already had about Blue Widgets we added rich anchor text (Blue Widgets) links that pointed to this new About Blue Widgets page. (long before we wised up about keyword rich anchor texts and Google!) After seeing how much traffic was coming to the About Blue Widgets page, we created a whole new site, SiteB.com, which was about Widgets (not just Blue Widgets), a page for each color of widget, and other pages about widgets. SiteB.com has an important and popular page, SiteB.com/blue-widgets, which is about Blue Widgets. We then 301 redirected the SiteA.com's About Blue Widgets page to SiteB.com/blue-widgets. This page in SiteB.com ranked very high (like #2, #3) for years. Two weeks ago SiteB.com/blue-widgets fell out of the SERPs, but only for the phrase "Blue Widgets". The page still gets lots of traffic from other queries, and even the "Blue Widgets" query will bring up other pages on SiteB.com. So, the only thing hit is the specific query "Blue Widgets" for the specific page SiteB.com/blue-widgets. It seems obvious to me that Google took the combination of a) a site that it probably no longer liked since we sold it (SiteA.com) since it's gone downhill, b) the rich keyword anchor text on SiteA.com pages pointing to the SiteA.com page optimized for that keyword, and c) then being 301 Redirected to a SiteB.com Blue Widgets page optimized for that same anchor text. I only discovered the SiteA.com redirects last week, which I had completely forgotten about, and had them removed right away. My question is, 1) if this indeed was the issue, now that the redirects from SiteA.com to SiteB.com are gone will my ranking eventually go back to normal? and 2) is there anything I can do to get Google to notice the change and have it go back to how it was?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Doing a re-design but worried about my new navigation affecting rankings
Hi, I'm a little worried/interested in the affects of my new navigation on ranking. So here is the current site - followuk.co.uk/mothers-day I have chosen an internal page because 99% of my traffic goes to these and generally external links and social shares happen on these pages (naturally because of the nature of the content). As you can see I have a nav bar on the left which links to all other pages. In my new design I will get rid of this nav bar altogether and have a breadcrumb which will give the user the option to root back to a category page which will contain these links instead. Kind of like this: Home > Important Dates > Mothers Day (if your on the mothers day page) I'm in two minds because maybe pages are passing PageRank helping each other to rank, but on the other side maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
Should i continue linking the old page after a redirect 301?
hi everybody, i'm trying to understand why my page http://poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it isn't ranked for the keyword poltrona frau brescia even if is indexed on google. the page gets authority and traffic from the page www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.html that is already ranked in fourth position for that keyword. should i continue linking the previous or the new page to increase the page authority? i don't know if is a good way to link a page not ranked despite a ranked one.. Please help me.... thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
Problem w/ 301 Redirect
Here is how I did the configuration of the redirects: I don’t understand why the destination page is different from the one is configured in the apache server. Any ideas? For example: http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/entertainment/ is being already being 301 redirected to a 404 page (http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.htmlentertainment/) that does not exist on the Apache server. As you can see, the url was incorrectly written. Another occurrence from the spreadsheet is http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/beach.html, which is also being 301 redirected to a 404 page (http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.htmlgallery/beach.html). This is causing a hard 404 page. Here is my .httpaccess file: <virtualhost 192.168.200.25:80=""></virtualhost> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /home/www/solgroup/americas/meliacaribetropical.com ServerName www.meliacaribetropical.com ServerAlias meliacaribetropical.com Redirect permanent /spanish/services/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html Redirect permanent /entertainment/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html Redirect permanent /press/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/restaurantes/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /spanish/entertainment/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /spanish/services/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /es/spa/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /spanish/accommodations/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/habitaciones.html Redirect permanent /spanish/spa/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /spanish/royal/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicio-real.html Redirect permanent /spanish/dining/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /spanish/flintstones/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html Redirect permanent /es/reuniones-eventos/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/grupos.html Redirect permanent /lowest-rate.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /es/los-picapiedra/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /gallery/beach.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /gallery/dining.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/gastronomy.html Redirect permanent /gallery/pools.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/sitemap.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/playa.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/restaurantes.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/piscinas.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/beach.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/pools.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/dining.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /spanish/press/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /en/groups.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html Redirect permanent /terms-condition.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /es/all_inclusive.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/terms-condition.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/family-facilities-amenities.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/outside-us-telephone-listing.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /press/family-facilities-amenities.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0