[Avoid this] Google ranking lowered because of 301 redirect

[Kelvinjw]

So I once read a post from Neil Patel's blog on increasing google ranking by removing dates from your post url. This made sense. At that time I already had over 270 post on my blog. So I changed my permalink a month ago and redirected most of my old urls to the new one. Now my ranking lowered by about 50% instead of increasing. Keywords I usually rank for no longer rank my site. I have had search console recraw my site several times and all to no avail.

Please avoid 301 redirect. This is my advise to bloggers

If you have any suggestions that may be of help to me please shot it out.

 

[RiverDave]

Hmm, read something official that you do not loose juice from 301. At least not in the long-term. Maybe it's just temporary.

 

[Bread]

If you have any suggestions that may be of help to me please shot it out.

Put things back to the way they were, remove 301? I have noticed things being a lot slower so don't sweat it just yet

 

[Zwielicht]

Did you double-check to ensure that the old URLs were redirecting to the new URLs? I've 301 redirected pages on multiples sites much larger than that, and the only time I ever saw a ranking loss was when I screwed up on the 301 redirect.

Wordpress doesn't always automatically 301 redirect URLs when you change the URL structure, especially in cases where you move blog posts to a new folder. You should have double checked your URLs when you changed the structure to confirm that they had been 301 redirected, but it's not too late to regain your rankings.

When I was modifying my URL structure to make it more organised, I used Eggplant 301 Redirects due to its great features and easy of use. Don't ever use Simple 301 Redirects. I initially used that plugin to redirect my old URLs to the new ones on a few sites, and it inexplicably stopped working after a couple of days, causing me to lose some of my rankings on a few posts, although I regained these rankings after I added them to the Eggplant plugin.

If I remember correctly, a wildcard will redirect all of the pages in a specific folder such as www.yousite.com/blog/ to a new folder like www.yoursite.com/superblog/. I personally don't like using wildcards unless a website I'm working on has a thousand pages, but you could certainly give them a try.

I went through this recently in an attempt to procure sitelinks for my site (which I succeeded in doing) in the SERPs as well as to clean up the URL structure of my site. What you have to do is simply organise or change the URLs (e.g., yoursite.com/silly-seo-service to yoursite.com/services/seo) and then use an analytics program to find the most popular pages on your site and 301 redirect the most important pages on your site first (in order to avoid disrupting your visitors). This will allow you to easily make the changes without your visitors noticing.

In the event that you forget to 301 redirect one of the URLs, this actually isn't as much of an issue as you would think. For example, there was a page on my site that I forgot to 301 redirect and I noticed that the page was no longer ranking in the 1st position like it had been because it had been removed from the SERPs entirely as it "no longer existed". After I went back and 301 redirected the page, I managed to slowly climb back up in the SERPs starting on the 3rd page on the first week, 2nd page the second week, position 8 the 3rd week, and finally position 3 on the 4th week.

Additionally, is it possible that your ranking loss was due to something else?

 

[Kelvinjw]

Additionally, is it possible that your ranking loss was due to something else?

it is not possible. My contents are unique and when I post my keyword, the same as the title of the post, into search engine the page will be found on page 3 of Google search engine result page. Some of the keywords I lost came back and ranked number 1. Before not, If I create a new post, it ranked number 1 in SERP the next day (competition in my niche is less in the country I target). Now I have created over 20 unique posts that are hardly found in other sites, yet no ranking.
Kind of frustrated.