WebProNews » Redirects

Redesigning Your Site? Don’t Make it Harder for Google to Extract the Text

Chris Crum — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:51:57 +0000

Google posted one of the Matt Cutts Q&A videos today, where he talks about the effects of site redesigns with redirects on search rankings. Here’s the specific question as it was posed to Matt:

I’m changing the platform of my blog. All old URLs will redirect to new ones. But, since the HTML code and layout of the pages are different, do you lose search engine rankings?

“Well, search engine rankings can change when the page changes itself,” Cutts responds. “If you’re doing the 301s correctly – a permanent redirect from the old site to the new site, and if you’re doing it at a page level – so from the old page to the new page – you should be in relatively good shape, but it’s not just incoming links.”

“It’s also the content of the page itself,” he continues. “So if you had a really good layout with a really clean design, where all the text was really easily indexed, and you move to something that was a lot more confusing, and maybe the text wasn’t as easy for us to extract, that could change your search rankings for the downside, or for the negative.”

“In general, we’re relatively good about changing layouts and still being able to discern what that page is about, but here’s one test that you could do: as long as you haven’t done the transition yourself, if you can try making a few tests, where you can take the layout of the new page or the new site, and see if you can apply it in some very simple ways to the old site, then that’s a way to isolate those, because it’s just like any scientific experiment,” he says. “If you do two things at once, and your rankings go down, you can’t decouple what caused it. Whereas if you can change just the layout – even if it’s only on a few pages, to try out and see whether your rankings change with that, then you’ll know – was it more likely to be because of the redirects or because I was changing my HTML layout.”

In terms of layouts, you may also do well to consider the role design plays in how Google determines quality content. Would people be comfortable giving your site their credit card info? Design can play a big role in this. Another question on Google’s list of “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article,” is “Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?” Then there’s the whole load time factor. Google does count page speed as a ranking signal.

Love Letters from Googlebot

Chris Crum — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:22:00 +0000

In a mildly weird fashion, Google answered some questions regarding HTTP status codes and "if-modified-since" from users who were either made up or had their names changed to protect their anonymity. Names like Little Jimmy, Temp O’Rary, Janet Crinklenose, and Frankie O’Fore (my apologies to any Janet Crinklenoses who may be out there, but I think I’m safe in my assumption that the name is fictitious).

"Sorry, guys – the fluffy distraction of the dating theme stopped me reading it. I’ll find another, concise article to read about this," says one comment on Google’s post. I guess this isn’t the one he’s looking for since I’m already in my second paragraph about it. But point taken. Let’s try to pick through this nonsense.

One letter talks about cleaning up a site, deleting some old pages, and whether or not 404 pages are ok. "404s are the standard way of telling me that a page no longer exists," says….umm, the GoogleBot. "I won’t be upset—it’s normal that old pages are pruned from websites, or updated to fresher content. Most websites will show a handful of 404s in the Crawl Diagnostics over at Webmaster Tools. It’s really not a big deal. As long as you have good site architecture with links to all your indexable content, I’ll be happy, because it means I can find everything I need."

The post then goes on to address similar items like 301 and 302 redirects for pages linked to by ohers that no longer exist or have been moved, and dynamic pages with changing content. The GoogleBot says for example:

"Once you’re indexed, it’s the polite way to tell your visitors that your address is still the right one, but that the content can temporarily be found elsewhere. In these situations, a 302 (or the rarer ’307 Temporary Redirect’) would be better. For example, orkut redirects from http://orkut.com to http://google.com/accounts/login?service=orkut, which isn’t a page that humans would find particularly useful when searching for Orkut***.

It’s on a different domain, for starters. So, a 302 has been used to tell me that all the content and linking properties of the URL shouldn’t be updated to the target – it’s just a temporary page.

You can find more info in the post like how supporting the "If-Modified-Since" header and returning 304 can save bandwidth, and you may find the answers to redirect-related questions you have. That is if you can stomach the presentation of the information.

Expect Google Webmaster Tools Makeover

Navneet Kaushal — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:13:37 +0000

The official Google Webmaster Central Blog says within 6 weeks, an overall overhauled Webmaster central – both its Content and Organization will be unveiled.

On June 5, Google Webmaster Central blog announced its plans to restructure Webmaster Tools help and on the next day, it released new Webmaster guidelines like hidden text or hidden links, cloaking or sneaky redirects and automated queries to Google, to name a few.

Complaints and suggestions from webmasters and user for what they would expect in the latest Webmaster Tools Help Center include:

"It’s not as easy as it should be to find the information you’re looking for. You’d like Google to do a better job of surfacing the answers to the most common questions.

The browse structure doesn’t make it easy for users to find help, and sometimes search depends on users knowing exactly the right term to search for.

You like the idea of context-sensitive help – on-the-spot assistance (often shown in a tooltip that appears when you hover over an item) that doesn’t require you to click to a different Help page.

Right now, it’s not clear when new Help information – or new features – are added, and you’d like Google to look at calling these out.

You want Help to be more useful:

You’d like Google to look at adding videos and graphics

You’d like us to providing the kind of information that’s relevant to the average webmaster, who may not have a deep knowledge of SEO techniques. You’re looking for good and understandable answers to common questions.

You’d like us to expand the actual content, and do a much better job in explaining potential reasons why sites may have dropped the rankings."

Some of our personal feedback include:

If Google Webmaster Central can show the status of crawl of sitemap in the dashboard. Basically date when Google last crawled sitemap.xml, this will be handy for webmasters who have more than one site in Google Webmaster Tools.

Regular mail to be sent if some error occur in the xml file will be helpful as not all the Webmasters login to check the Webmaster Tools daily.
Also some way of integrating it with Google Analytics will really be helpful.

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AOL Needs To Shine Its Shoes

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:07:55 +0000

This article will be part tutorial, part sweating the small stuff. The tutorial is much, much shorter and more basic than the rest, so we’ll get to it first. AOL needs to hear it.

When you remove a webpage, or move it to a new domain, it’s nice for your visitors if you notify them and/or automatically redirect them to the new location. A quick Google search brings up lots of advice on 301 and 302 redirects.

While all of this technical code Web jargon mumbo jumbo may seem to have little to do with the polished rhetoric of public relations, it comes down, at it’s heart, to image. An image takes a lot of work to maintain, and it’s attention to detail that makes the difference.

An event planner, a good one, knows that before a big dinner, somebody needs to check the salt and pepper shakers to make sure not only that the lids are on tight, but also that the spices therein haven’t swelled too big for the holes overnight.

Maybe I’m cranky on Monday morning. Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.

But this is where AOL’s media relations page was. Now, it’s a sea of white with an island of Not Found in the corner. There’s no notice of where the page has gone, no redirection to Time Warner’s press release page, where it seems AOL announcements will be handled in the future.

It’s a small annoyance, hardly more than an itch on your tongue perhaps. But it does nothing for the image of an already turbulent company coming off an extraordinarily bad year.

Last year, when AOL’s 2006 PR nightmare reached its peak, when it appeared that the PR department, not because of their own faults but because of the faults of the company itself, was snapping under blunder after blunder, I poured salt in the wound.

The last quarter of the 2006 saw company shakeups and corporate communication heads roll. After the Christmas holiday, the aforementioned PR webpage just fell apart. Images stopped working, and appeared as those unsightly x’s.

New announcements, when they finally resumed after a week or two, showed up below an announcement that was dated December 22nd. That December press release wasn’t about anything super important, but it stayed put as datelines January 17, 22, and 31 popped up beneath it.

And I thought to myself then: has AOL really just let their media page go un-maintained? That’s like showing up to a job interview with a five o’clock shadow and a lit cigarette.

It’s the little things like a sharp pair of cufflinks, or shined shoes, or creased trousers, that convey a message – especially in times of trouble – that a person has it all together. A person in PR, even when his office is on fire, shows up outside looking sharp.

So what are we to think after AOL loses $140 billion in value, bleeds subscribers, has to overhaul their business model, has to tap dance all year around one crisis after another, if their public face appears out of the rubble dirty and broken?

We think that if AOL really has its act together, it should look like it has its act together by sweating the small stuff first – especially its appearance on the Web where its bread is buttered.

Just my two cents, for what it’s worth.

Map Those URL Redirects To Profit

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:26:48 +0000

There are right ways to do URL redirection that will make a big difference in one’s site performance, as shown in a recent case study about a plumbing website that made their URLs more readable.

Site publishers with dreams of e-commerce profits should be interested in the work PlumberSurplus.com put into remapping their URLs into ones that make search engines sit up and take notice. A fifty-percent increase in daily visits should be a pretty good wake-up call.

Eric Enge cited the effects of changing from dynamic URLs to ones that are more human-readable, and thus more search spider-friendly. The plumbing supply site finished switching over those URLs in December 2006:

In addition to remapping the URLs, Plumber Surplus was careful to 301 redirect the existing URLs to the new ones. This was done on a URL by URL basis, using asp.net to parse the request and rewrite the URL.

The majority of the new URLs were indexed by Yahoo and Google within 2 weeks. MSN took somewhat longer. Within two months, rankings began to improve, and the number of indexed pages began to increase.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN all indexed more pages, though Google’s number fell back from 85,600 to 62,200 from January to March. Site traffic improved from 9,000 daily visitors at the beginning of November 2006 to 13,500 on March 1st.

Enge noted other SEO work took place during this time, but said there were no major new links gained during the restructuring.

Carsten Cumbrowski commented about the case study, and said he wasn’t surprised by what PlumberSurplus.com found:

My eyes looked in disbelief at the numbers when I did it for the first time for a site of mine in 2002. Search engine spiders had back then much bigger problems with dynamic URLs than they have today. Google even changed their Guidelines not (too) long ago regarding dynamic URLs. However, this study shows that it still makes a difference for the search engines today and that you look into this for your own website, if you have cryptic looking dynamic URLs.

Though Cumbrowski expressed concern about making these changes so quickly (he observed that the site changed nearly all of their URLs in one night), the possible drawbacks did not materialize. Since the potential for the dreaded ‘duplicate content’ penalties from search engines exist, site publishers may want to tread more slowly than the case study site did when proceeding.

301 Redirects Resolve in 2 Weeks in Google

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:30:34 +0000

A thread over in the Google Webmaster Groups talks about the Google Sandbox, and about 301 redirects. In this thread, Adam Lasnik jumps in and sets some expectations on the handling of 301 redirects, and also does some myth breaking. Here is what Adam has to say:

1) There’s no universal/intentional sandbox. But, as Matt has noted and MRG has quoted (hey, that kinda rhymes), there are algorithms which have a sandbox-like effect on some sites.

2) 301s pass PR and related signals appropriately. Usually takes a couple of weeks for things to smooth out, though.

Most advanced SEOs abandoned the notion of the sandbox a long time ago, and now focus on the process of building trust in their sites (or getting into the trust box).

But confirmation from Google on the speed at which they handle 301s is new (to me at least). This confirms what we have seen in our own experience.

About 15 months ago we took a site with about 20,000 pages and we moved every single URL on the domain, except the home page. It was a massive move, and potentially a very costly one, as the site drove most of its revenue from organic traffic from Google.

The site made the move within 2 to 3 weeks. In that timeframe, the URLs Google was showing in their index had all updated to the new URLs, and the rankings of the pages were completely in line with the rankings of the pages prior to the move. This was great stuff.

However, as I noted in the Google Groups thread above, a massive move like the one we made does come with risks. I would not do it unless you really, really, really need to.

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301 Redirects Pass Google PageRank In 2 Weeks

Navneet Kaushal — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:45:26 +0000

Search Engine Roundtable reports that 301 Redirects Pass Google PageRank & Signals in a "Couple Weeks". SEOs and Webmasters have always queried about the time taken for a site to pass along a PageRank value from one URL to another via a 301 redirect.

Google’s Adam Lasnik responded via a Google Groups thread, saying that it takes only about a couple weeks.

Adam says:

301s pass PR and related signals appropriately. Usually takes a couple of weeks for things to smooth out, though.

Search Engine Roundtable says, “I was a bit shocked by the statement of just "a couple of weeks" for 301s to "pass PR and related signals appropriately." I always thought it was a couple months or more. Well, maybe Google picks up the changes within a couple weeks. I.e. the time it takes to crawl the new information and URLs. But maybe by the time all this data is processed it takes longer?”

Adam Lasnik has responded to this general query, however what really did he mean by ‘things to smooth out’ is still not clear.

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About the Author

Nav is the founder and CEO of Page Traffic, a premier search engine company known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.

Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be found in the "Best Articles" section of many websites and article banks. As a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his knowledge is in application here.

PubCon: The Duplicate Content Zone

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:41:48 +0000

A PubCon session entered a place beyond indexing and search traffic: The Duplicate Content Zone, where websites sometimes go and are never seen again. WebProNews tagged along as the session hosts played the Rod Serling role for the audience.

Too much duplicate content on a website will drop it in the SERPs faster than the Tower Of Terror at Disney World plummets its riders. Only you don’t have Matt Cutts dressed in a bellhop outfit pulling the lever in Orlando. Bill Slawski not only makes me envious with his patent coverage, but the fact that he’s a short drive from steamed blue crabs when they’re in season. He touched on the topic of printer-friendly pages, which many sites make available as a convenience for their visitors. These pages should go in a separate folder, and protected from spidering by a relevant entry in the site’s robots.txt file. If the same page has different URLs, be sure to use 301 redirects to help visitors along to the desired page. Slawski noted that duplicate content happens sometimes when one site takes content from another. This infringement could end up costing a site publisher in terms of duplicate content penalties. He recommended contacting the site owner and its host before embarking on more serious legal action or a DMCA notice. While many dynamically generated sites use session IDs to track a visitor’s session, these should not be served to indexes that visit. Some spiders ignore these by default, but if one’s site has session ID pages showing up in a search engine then some steps to stop this will need to be taken. Yahoo’s Tim Converse illustrated the point by noting Yahoo won’t even index a crawled site if it is determined to be a duplicate. They look at approximate copies as well, not just word-for-word ones. Being similar does not necessarily mean a site will be excluded from the index. Not all duplication is evil. Hosting content in HTML and Microsoft Word format for visitor choice would be an example, as would syndication of content. Abusive stuff like scraper sites and weaving content from different pages to make a new page will get one in trouble. Google’s Brian White said his company filters content in a number of pipelines. Anyone hoping for additional insight will be disappointed, as White did not provide details of how this is done. If other sites showing up in Google are scraping one’s content, Google can help under the DMCA law. They provide a contact page with more information about DMCA takedowns. Using the DMCA can be more perilous than anything in the Duplicate Content Zone. Ask a lawyer for advice before handing out a takedown notice.

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Yahoo Redirects Webmaster Queries

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 22:11:58 +0000

Webmasters on the hunt for certain information through Yahoo Search will begin seeing their queries redirected to Site Explorer, which just received a significant update.

As SES 2006 draws to a close in San Jose, webmasters from all over will make their way home. Filled with new knowledge and vendor schwag, they will eventually position themselves in front of the cold fire of a computer monitor. From there, the quest for better placement and higher conversions continues.

Those who have made Yahoo Search part of their strategy to achieve online success will notice a change in how the link:, site:, and linkdomain: operators work. Priyank Garg, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search, provided the news on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Queries for page and inlink data performed through Yahoo Search will redirect to Site Explorer. The data obtained there will be the same as it was in Yahoo Search. Garg listed what will and will not redirect in the post:

To reiterate, the following types of queries will be redirected:
• site:ysearchblog.com
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com

All other queries, such as the ones below, will not be redirected:
• ysearchblog.com
• ysearchblog
• site:ysearchblog.com webmasters (looking for ysearchblog posts mentioning webmasters)
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html Danny Sullivan (looking for links to the article mentioning Danny Sullivan)
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com site:yahoo.com (looking for links to ysearchblog from within yahoo.com)

Garg also recommended webmasters use the Web Services APIs Yahoo provides for Site Explorer through its developer network.

“The APIs provide the same data and will be more stable and easier to parse than our search page, which we regularly change to make user experience improvements for our users,” Garg noted.

Indeed, Yahoo offers Page Data, Inlink Data, and Update Notification APIs for webmasters to use. More information about these may be found at the relevant Yahoo discussion group, Yahoo! Search General Developer Support.

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Strumpette Sends Unsolicited Email, Then Redirects

Shel Holtz — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:26:28 +0000

I have stayed away from the Strumpette fray. It struck me as a lose-lose proposition.

Applaud Amanda Chapel (whoever he or she may really be) for injecting a bit of fun into the sometimes strident and self-important PR blogosphere and get flogged for endorsing an effort that drags PR back into the gutter from which we’ve been trying so hard to extricate ourselves. Attack Strumpette for the oh-so-many levels at which the blog is bad and suffer attacks for having no sense of humor. Besides, so many of my peers have done such a great job of giving Strumpette the attention she/he so desparately seeks. Even Doc Searls has written about her. Twice.

A couple things have prompted me to go ahead and comment, though. First, I checked my Gmail account last night and found two messages from Amanda herself, one on March 26 and one on March 27. The subject line of the first messagewas preceded in all caps by the words: COMMENTS REQUESTED; the message was a cut-and-paste of the first Strumpette blog entry, the one speculating on the duration of Steve Rubel’s tenure at Edelman. The subject line of the second was preceded, again in all caps, merely with STRUMPETTE. It was another cut-and-paste of another blog post.

I don’t remember signing up for emails from Amanda. Come to think of it, I don’t remember an offer to opt in. Which I wouldn’t have. So Amanda (whoever he she is) sent me unsolicited email to draw me to her blog. I don’t know about you, but I would avoid any blog that send me an unsolicited email. Amanda clearly has never been to TheNewPR to read any of the many entries on how to pitch bloggers.

But I’d already been to Strumpette and read all the various opinions appearing throughout the blogosphere. I read about how the site was up and down, up and down (kinda like Amanda, I guess). Multiple visits by the curious and not-too-busy might account for that, if the server hosting the site wasn’t prepared for the load. This morning, though, Strumpette redirects me to a demonstration page for a service called WePublishing, a service that lets you set up your own online newspaper for a mere $200 setup fee and $150 per month. Searls points out that WePublishing has been around since “back when Technorati still counted only 7.8 million blogs.”

It could be that the whole Strumpette exercise was a PR agency’s plan to get a lot of people-particularly PR people-to take a look at WePublishing. You gotta hand it to whatever agency came up with this plan: “Lure people to our client’s site by sending unsolicited emails and manipulating word-of-mouth marketing, then pandering to their taste for a bit of controversy (e.g., the Rubel exit date pool) and a bit of smut. Then pull the ol’ bait-and-switch on em.”

Truly a campaign that would make any agency proud. I see a Silver Anvil in their future.

Or, I suppose, the whole WePublishing redirect could just be some kind of technical glitch. If you believe that, I suspect you’re also still waiting for US forces to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Who is Amanda really? I really don’t care. But if all this truly does wind up being a publicity campaign for a web property, then she/he is certainly nobody I’d want to work with or recommend.

UPDATE: Well, well. An hour later, the URL takes us to this:

Due to a huge spike in traffic, we are having to move to a new server. In less than 3 days! That’s got to be a record.

We should have this all set up within the next 48 hours. Sorry for any inconvenience.

For Amanda’s fans, she’d like you to know that she is deeply grateful for your patience ad concern. She asks that you stay tuned. She’s got a few zingers written and just iching to be published.

Thanks Again. See you soon.

So what’s the real story? I still don’t care.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.