301 Redirect - lost all juice

Last year I started using Wordpress in place of the custom CMS I had been using for years. There are still plenty of articles on the old CMS that are very well ranked on Google.

I decided to take one of them and move it to Wordpress, and inserted a 301 redirect. The content is the same, but Wordpress has some advantages over my CMS for SEO, such as built in meta tags, etc. The domain is the same.

Here's what happened after I switched on November 26:



I checked for any problems, and could find none. Google has indexed the new URL, they even cached the latest version! It has not been delisted at all, it just moved from the #1 location for its usual keywords, down to page 3.

Obviously, I am not going to move the rest of my site to Wordpress any time soon!

Have any of you come across something like this? Do you know if it goes back to 'normal'?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if you're #1 already?

By the way, meta tags are worthless for SEO, they have exactly zero effect.

How much of a delay was there between the switch and the 301 redirect? Most of your ranking is determined by backlinks. If the 301 was not insretd immediately, it's likely that the links pointing to the old URL broke and lost their value; the 301 now redirects them to the new url, but link age is hugely important to link value, and new links don't have nearly as much power as old ones.

Additionally, did the URL structure change? If you have not got a bunch of subfolders within the URL ( indicated by / ), this also tends to hurt your rankings.

Beyond this, it's hard to say what else may have changed without taking a look.

The 301 has nothing to do with SEO, I needed to use it because I wanted to switch from an old CMS to a new one.

I thought the links to the old URL would automatically 'forward' to the new one - in other words, that's what I thought the whole point of 301 was. But I guess I was wrong.

I guess I will have to keep all my old articles on the old CMS. I can't have 7 years worth of content disappearing off search engines!

Thanks

Yes it can be a challenge to switch to sites with different URL's and link structures.
At least you had the wherewithal to only do one page first...

There are a couple of things you could look at to repair the problem.

1. Try and see who linked to your old article, ask them if they could switch the link to point at the new location.
2. Are you positive the header is returning a 301 permanently moved message on the old URL? you can check that here
3. You could move it back, if you are on page 3 the chance it may rank again seems worth the risk of doing nothing.
4. point the links in your old CMS directly at the new URL rather than going through the redirect.

That being said Philip made a good point. If the articles are ranking well then you may as well leave them where they are at if it is not a huge inconvenience.

Everything seems to check out. I was going to see if it would fix itself if I left it, but I think you're right that it is a better idea to move the link back instead.

Do you think it would work better if I instead created a copy of the old article in the new CMS, but "overwrote" the URL instead of 301 redirecting it? That way, the URL will be the same. I'm sure it could be done with some .htaccess trickery

Thanks

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page.

after using 301 redirection. you have again your backlinks in google then its effect for ranking....

Always have the 301 redirections in place before you go online with a new system - as mentioned before in this thread link age is very important, and if google finds a link dead or redirected the wrong way (ex. meta redirection) you may be in trouble.

If u run on a linux type server use .htaccess, og if running on a windows based server, put the 301 redirect serverside - and the PR will get forwarded to new page - but the PR may be reduced after moving, if the new page is "worse" than the page moving from.. (ex. different content, worse onpage SEO, etc)

Interesting topic. Is there no way that you could have maintained the previous directory structure when you moved to Wordpress? After all, there must be plenty of URLs which haven't changed.

If you'd gone for Drupal you would have easily been able to assign URLs at your own discretion via the 'path' module. I'm not sure if Wordpress has anything like this, but it may be worth looking into (although the damage may already be done).

Perhaps things will click back into place over time.

Just point the links in your old CMS directly at the new URL rather than going through the redirect.

Can anybody tell me, why we use CMS?

As the name sugggests, Content Management Systems manage your content. They save you having to code pages which are similiar over and over again as the CMS will typically know how to create the type of page which you want to add. All you have to do is provide the content.

For example. Lets say that you have a website which is used for hotel bookings. Each hotel is likely to have it's own page on the site and with the exception of the actual content, the coding of this page is likely to be very similar to that of all other hotel pages on the site.

Rather than having to re-submit all this common code again each time you want to add a new 'hotel' page the CMS would simply allow you to input the aspects of the page which differ from the other pages - for example, the price per room, a photo of the hotel and a description of facilities. Once you've done this the CMS will generate a page for the new hotel which looks like all the others.

This is just one example of the capabilities of a CMS and there are many more. Essentially they save you a lot of time through code reuse, allow you to control the submission of content and provide you with a mechanism of defining relationships between types of content on your site.

Do you need a CMS? Well, if you're going to be running a big site with lots of pages which are quite similiar in terms of presentation then probably. If you're just planning on building a small 1-5 page website then you may be able to do without, but even in that case a solution that Wordpress can be a sensible option.

Big sites....Drupal or Joomla, and if you've got your head screwed on the only real option is Drupal.