SEO and 301 Redirects
Toni on Sep 6th 2007
I refuse to begin my blog post with “I haven’t written in my blog for a long time blah blah blah”. Obviously writing in my blog is not my forte. I always have great ideas and don’t seem to follow through. Today I am so moved to write about 301 redirects. This is not a post about how to do 301 redirects, believe me there are many of those out there. What I want to relate is the importance, the freak out factor and the search engine affect involved when one goes through the 301 redirect process, making a domain change or file change on their website.
When one gains ranking for a major keyword term, you never want to lose it. I am always checking Google to see how I or my clients rank for certain terms. As usual we go up, down but tend to stay in a pretty stable placement if we continue to update our sites and stay ahead of the competition.
Just recently I had a client that for one reason or another had to change their domain name for legal reasons, they shall remain unnamed. I walked this particular client through what needed to be done, so that they did not lose page rank or get dinged for duplicate content. We went through the painful process of implementing the 301 redirect on the site. Everything was working great, Google had not made the update but the redirect was working. Then the Google bomb drops!!!
Phone call, from client “I am on page 7 for my XXX keyword, so much for your 301redirect”. In the SEO business you either have clients that are thrilled with you or irate with you. In my humblest voice I told them not to worry that Google was making their adjustments and they would retain their old ranking when the dust settles. Maybe not #1 but, it would slowly work it’s way back up. Client “we will see, it was fun while it lasted, …. I have to go to an appointment.” –click– That was a week ago at most.
Today I did a quick look see and guess what, there they were, not #1 (as they had been) but #3. I just love this business!! Did I say “told you so”? It was tempting, my next suggestion to them, was to put up a blog posting or update a page using those precious keywords.
One thing SEO has taught me is how to take abuse politely and with wise patience. I will not allow Google to control my life; only my keywords.
Filed in SEO |
Hi Toni,
I think your statement “Obviously writing in my blog is not my forte” is not accurate - you do write very well, and I have checked out your blog a few times! I hear you loud and clear on the 301’s - they make me nervous when I have had to do them, and you can always expect a dip when you do them, but rankings will always come back (more or less).
I can’t tell you how many times I have been called by a client “Hey, where’d my rankings go?.” My response now is usually “Give it a few days…”
David
Hi Dave,
Gosh I hope you are still out there. Here it is the end of February and I just wrote a post about “dusting off my blog”. I recently had a similar experience where a clients “secondary site” was showing up better for the main keywords they wanted to be found for than the “primary site”. I said whoa!!! cut the brakes on your secondary site. Unless it is very important to you. What happened, in the next couple of weeks the primary site reappeared for the “primary search keywords”.
I would like to hear more about your experience so fill free to share if you are still out there. I apologize for not being a “lazy blogger”. Ohhhh my new post idea!!