SEO post ranking affected by Site URL change?

  • Resolved consumerista

    (@consumerista)


    2 years, 12 months ago

    Hey all. How’s it going.

    A few days ago, I changed all my URLs on WordPress to remove the date. I set up redirects, which was working excellently. I notice, however, that I am getting next to no views on some popular pages on my site. I was getting anywhere from 15-30 a day, and now, a few days later, there is anywhere from 0-5 hits. I checked the new pages for those URLs–they are working great, loading fast, etc. I also notice that Google already updated the URLs for the most popular posts on my site. That is to say, they are not even redirecting from the old URL, which means Google saw the change.

    Any reason why the pages no longer redirecting (the more popular pages) would have lost SEO after the URL was updated? There aren’t a lot of links to these pages. All the traffic was coming from Google. And the redirects is still live, so it wouldn’t have affected any links.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    If the pages aren’t properly redirected with a 301 Permanent redirect, there’s no way for Google to know that they are the new versions of something established in their index.

    Essentially, without a redirect, everything under your new domain is at best brand new fresh content or at worst a duplication of existing content on another site (which is heavily penalized).

    WordPress itself doesn’t manage redirects across domain names. What were you using to handle those redirects before?

    Thread Starter consumerista

    (@consumerista)

    I used Redirection to set up a redirect from the old posts with the date in the URL to the new URL. The Redirection was working good from the beginning. Many of my posts in Google are still redirecting from the old dated url to the new one.

    However, some of my more popular ones are no longer redirecting (this is a good thing I would presume, since it means Google updated it to the new URL). The only issue is I noticed that those pages aren’t getting any views, which makes me believe that pagerank was somehow affected, even though everything else looks good.

    I hadn’t followed these pages closely enough to manually be able to see the difference in pagerank. I just noticed they went from 30-50 pageviews a day to nearly 0.

    Thank you for your reply.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Are the old URLs still redirecting to the new URLs?

    Thread Starter consumerista

    (@consumerista)

    Yes, they are. The redirects were working from the very beginning. I plan to leave the redirects in place for a very long time.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Hm, then it would appear this is up to the mysteries of Google’s algorithm.

    Are you tracking your site’s performance in their search console?

    Thread Starter consumerista

    (@consumerista)

    I actually just downloaded that today. Takes a day to update.

    I have another very similar site (same theme, plugins) and there were no major issues.

    Wondering if it’s a weird thing about Google algorithm.

    Changing url structure seems like a high-risk thing to do, even when all proper protocols are followed. We’ll see if the pagerank gets restored in the next few days.

    You will need to wait for some time, this is the case with Google

    Thread Starter consumerista

    (@consumerista)

    I am fine to wait, as long as it comes back. My concern was that it wouldn’t come back. We’ll see.

    Thread Starter consumerista

    (@consumerista)

    To bring this full circle, it appears that I am gaining pagerank again. This is 3-5 days after the fact. Good to know changing URLs (with proper redirection) isn’t a death sentence for articles with pagerank.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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