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Did redirection chain kill our rankings?

by B Crandall
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a site that had 5 internal pages ranked page 1 on P1 for their relevant terms. It's a big corporate site of over 400 pages.

Prior to starting an optimization campaign, we had redirected http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com. We also had an HTTPS version that we didn't realize was running in parallel for about 8 months.

The site had little hierarchy and about 250 pages were http://mysite.com/this-subject-page.html

We'd also been using a plugin in Wordpress that assigned .html to each page.

We decided to optimize and did the following:

First we redirected http://www.mysite.com to https://www.mysite.com

Next we added some code in htaccess to redirect each .html to /

At completion of this phase, we'd gained significantly for about 20 keywords and had 14 pages now on P1.

Following this, we did the following:

Created a hierarchy with silos for top 20 topics.
Renamed about 160 pages with new titles (they were all too long) and metadescriptions (also too long)
Moved about 100 articles under 'blog' and 'articles'

Added manual 301s for all 260 pages for ex: http://www.mysite.com/mypage became http://www.mysite.com/my-parent/-my-page/

Note: at this point, you'll notice we have redirects from http to http://www then to https: then from .html to/ then the individual pages without the .html to the final location.

We added an 'internal links' plugin and ran some rules to cross-link pages.

We added breadcrumbs.

We also implemented AMP pages.

During the execution of this last stage, our developer screwed up and caused about 100 404s and accidentally renamed 65 pages with the same title. We then kept finding and reporting incorrect redirects, more 404s and other mistakes to her.

Our rankings plummeted to far below what they were at the start!

We then undid the internal links plugin thinking it was a factor. No change.

So question #1 is what do you think was biggest contributor to drop? 404s? Too many redirects?

Also, is there a better structure to redirect the pages?

Both Moz and SEMRush say site is incredibly well optimized now.

What else can be done to recover as rapidly as possible?
#chain #kill #rankings #redirection
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    It is tough to give you an answer without seeing the site and having some idea of timeframes.

    If all of these changes were done over the course of 6 months, then something to do with the latest change is the most likely culprit. If all the changes were implemented in 3 weeks, it will be much, much more difficult to narrow down to what the problem. Google doesn't recognize changes you make immediately, so if the changes were done in a pretty close time frame it will be almost impossible to determine when they noticed what change.
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  • Profile picture of the author HangTenSEO
    Based on what you are saying you're redirecting to pages that are then redirected. IMO that could reduce traffic.

    http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com to https://www.mysite.com

    You will lose roughly 90-99% with each redirect, so with 2 you have the chance of losing 90-99% first redirect and then another 90-99% on the second and final redirect.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by HangTenSEO View Post

      Based on what you are saying you're redirecting to pages that are then redirected. IMO that could reduce traffic.

      http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com to https://www.mysite.com

      You will lose roughly 90-99% with each redirect, so with 2 you have the chance of losing 90-99% first redirect and then another 90-99% on the second and final redirect.
      First, I think you mean 0-10% not 90-99%.

      There were tests done years ago that concluded you lose 0-10% of the linkjuice, link power, authority, whatever you want to call it, through a 301 redirect. Not traffic.

      How much traffic one would lose is impossible to calculate or estimate. That all depends on rankings, search volume etc. A drop from #1 to #2 is going to be a much greater traffic loss than a drop from #8 to #9.

      More recently, Google has stated that there is no loss of ranking power through a 301 redirect.

      I have recently worked on 3 different website redesigns where we did 301 redirects, and we saw zero impact on rankings. From my own personal experience, I believe Google in this case.

      It is doubtful the chain of redirects is causing an issue. Most sites that implemented HTTPS are doing the non-WWW to WWW (or vice-versa) and then from there to HTTPS in their redirects.

      One thing that really could have had a negative impact is the internal link plugin that was mentioned. It depends how out of control it was. But assuming that you had a decent internal link structure to begin with, every link that gets added to a page is weakening every other link on that page. So if it was adding 5-6 links in your content per page, it could have actually had the opposite impact of what was desired.

      The 404's also were not helping things.

      Again though, without seeing the site and understanding when changes were made, and unmade, everything is just speculation.
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  • Profile picture of the author ramonchek
    Test in 2016. You loose 15% on each redirect. And social signals.
    If you order ssl sertificate, better use with Company name in addressbar
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