301 redirects are BS

Abstroose

Abstroose

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I understood that 301 redirect retain all off-page SEO and link juice. Matt Cutts confirmed this himself. So to effectively improve the SEO of my site, and give it a more credible domain, I set up the following redirect:

old-domain.com -> new-domain-keyword.com

The old domain had no keywords, but the new domain includes my target keyword. Previously the site was ranking around #4-5 for my keyword. But now, after G has crawled the site and indexed the new domain, my site is not ranking in the top 10 pages at least.

Does anyone have any input or experiences similar to this?
 
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donnt you use the redirect tool in google webmaster tools?
 
Damn that sucks, I'm really interested in this also. I need to do a load of redirects due to the events that I was promoting have expired.
 
I have done 301 redirects in the past with my PR4 websites and everything went fine for me. However, I did notice that the sites did lose rankings for a week or so in the first month of the transition. After that, it was all fine.
 
promzzz said:
donnt you use the redirect tool in google webmaster tools?
Click to expand...

Yes, I registered the redirect in webmaster tools.

webnise said:
I have done 301 redirects in the past with my PR4 websites and everything went fine for me. However, I did notice that the sites did lose rankings for a week or so in the first month of the transition. After that, it was all fine.
Click to expand...

I hope this is true for most cases!
 
webnise said:
I have done 301 redirects in the past with my PR4 websites and everything went fine for me. However, I did notice that the sites did lose rankings for a week or so in the first month of the transition. After that, it was all fine.
Click to expand...


Maybe big G trying to see if your buying links? see if that link stays? I'm not an SEO guy so it's just a guess
 
Abstroose said:
I understood that 301 redirect retain all off-page SEO and link juice. Matt Cutts confirmed this himself. So to effectively improve the SEO of my site, and give it a more credible domain, I set up the following redirect:

old-domain.com -> new-domain-keyword.com

The old domain had no keywords, but the new domain includes my target keyword. Previously the site was ranking around #4-5 for my keyword. But now, after G has crawled the site and indexed the new domain, my site is not ranking in the top 10 pages at least.

Does anyone have any input or experiences similar to this?
Click to expand...

Sound similar to the google dance when you get new backlinks and the target site rankings temporaryly drop and raise back up later. So just wait 2-3 weeks to see what happens.
 
blazen said:
Sound similar to the google dance when you get new backlinks and the target site rankings temporaryly drop and raise back up later. So just wait 2-3 weeks to see what happens.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the input. It's only been a day since G indexed the new domain - I guess I'm being a little eager since my organic traffic has obviously dropped to 0%! :)

Will report back with the results in a couple of weeks.
 
Some gurus said that your new site will be in trouble if the old domain is unrelated. It is not my point. lol
 
When you do a redirect it is only instantaneous that any visitors or bots following the link will get to your new site.

As far as indexing is concerned, it will take more time. Even if you set the redirect in webmaster tools, google isn't just inserting the new domain into the index in place of the old domain. Each time the googlebots crawl one of the sites directing to the old domain, it will follow through the 301 to your new domain and then google will adjust the indexing for the new site. It will take some time for the googlebots to make it through all the backlinks. Many of those sites are being crawled daily, but many more are not.

Just give it time for google to follow all the backlinks and reindex the new site accordingly.
 
I've seen sites that transitioned from dynamic URLs to Static URLs with 301s that lost rankings for months before climbing back to where they were originally.

Generally speaking, it is usually best to keep past content where it is (no 301s) rather than doing massive redirects, unless it is absolutely necessary. It will be at least a couple of weeks if you're lucky, possibly months if Google is slow to reindex the site.

I would recommend building a few links to each major page if you can to encourage the search engines to come back and visit more often.
 
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