Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordspeakleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to a series not that hard for me here at Dawson hosting, as always, and today I'm going to be discussing 301 redirect confusion.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Now this is a story I just want to share with everybody on the podcast. One podcast listener will know this story already Hi, steve. This is because Steve, who's from Louisiana in the US, big friend of the show and user of keywords people use, and I think by his own admission you know he's new to SEO. He's been learning for maybe a year or so, I think, and listened to the podcast. He's had a few chats with me and I've helped him out with stuff, and I got an email from him a couple weeks ago and he had a question for me because he was going through and updating some of the content on his site and he'd actually decided to change the URL of one of his pages to better match the content of the page, because he'd updated the content of the page. Now we'll talk a little bit in a second about whether that's a good idea to do or not, but you know that's what he'd done and he was putting a 301 redirect from the old url to the new url, which is the right thing to do. So you're basically saying to google, when it comes to fetch, that url is no longer there, that you're not serving a page anymore. You put in a 301 redirect that says this page has been permanently moved to this new url. So you're saying to google pass over the um, any links, any historical ranking information to this new url. So essentially this the old url is now the new url. The new url needs to have the kind of ranking history of the old page.

Speaker 1: 2:57

Steve had done this and then he dropped me an email saying I'm just questioning whether he did it right or not. Uh, he didn't share with me the actual urls, so I just sort of gave an explanation about how you know. We've just done that. You know, through three or one ink um, it will pass the details over. Tell him when it comes the the older URL to go to the newer URL, everything should work fine.

Speaker 1: 3:17

And, um, I gave him that explanation in the email and I think, um, um, I may have confused him a little, because what I then went on to say was that you know, you might not necessarily want to be changing your URLs just because you've updated the content of the page, if you've. You know, generally, as a rule of thumb, I will never change the URL of a page, even if I update the content, even quite drastically, because it's only a very, very small signal what the actual keywords are in the URL, as compared to the risk of 301-ing something, because when you 301 something, there is always a slight degradation in those ranking signals. Google doesn't give an exact number, but it's thought to be around about 10% on external links, that kind of thing that you lower and lose when you're doing 301. Now, if you're really drastically changing the page, the copy of the page, maybe you know it should be a brand new page rather than going back and altering an old one. Um, but he, you know steve had made this change and I said to him now you made the change. I said well, just stick with it, but always think in future very carefully about whether you think you need to change your role, because you can sometimes cause more issues than you try and solve by changing it. Yeah, so I explained that to steve and he came back and just said, oh, I was just worried that you know the url was targeting the wrong keyword.

Speaker 1: 4:38

After he'd rewritten the content, um, and so you know, I just sort of came back and said, yeah, well, the trouble is obviously, you know you're gonna have a piece of content can rank for so many different keywords, so many different queries, that it's impossible to get every single query and keyword into the url. So it doesn't matter if. If those change over time, you know google will understand the content of the page. It will only place a small amount on what the keywords are in the URL. So, like I said, I've only ever I think once, it was only ever once I changed some of the URLs, the major URLs in broadbandcouk, and that was when we moved from one platform to another.

Speaker 1: 5:19

And historically, because we didn't know better when we first did broadbandcouk, we were using Java server pages, which I don't think they even exist anymore. So lots of our URLs ended in jsp and we just rewound them to remove those sort of technology-specific endings, and that was in back in 2010, 2009, 2010. And other than that, I don't think I ever changed any of the major URLs during that time, certainly not for just because you're updating the content. I think that solved Steve's problem and he got the 3.0.1 setup right Now. He then came back and he was concerned, obviously, that in Google Search Console the old URL was still showing it in google search console. Now, this is because google search console takes a little bit of time to update its data. It's not real-time data, so if you're making changes, they're not going to immediately show in google search console. So, yeah, so if you did 301 one page to then you might even see a situation where both of those URLs can show up for a time in Google Search Console as being in the index when they're not. Google would have spotted one and moved it to the other, but it just takes time for that data to show up.

Speaker 1: 6:38

But Steve didn't know this. Why would he know this if no one ever told him? So he was then trying to find a method to remove it from the index and what he did was then accidentally 301 the new page back to the old page and then accidentally created what's known as a circular redirect. So google was going, or anyone could go to the old url and it'd say 301, this old url is now 301 to the new url. So the browser crawler whoever would go to the old URL and it'd say this old URL is now 301 to the new URL. So the browser crawler whoever would go to the new URL and the new URL would say this URL is 301 back to the old URL. So the browser would then go back to the old URL, which would then say no, this is transferred to the new URL and keep going around in a circle like that. And after so many attempts I think Alan Crane will try about 20 attempts, so 20 odd attempts they'll give up essentially and say no, broken, not working.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Um, so obviously I should, you know, explain to see if that this is what he'd done and it's obviously an easy fix just remove the 301, redirected, put in the url. And yeah, he fixed it all up fine and everything yet is now good on his site and yeah, so he now knows how to do 301s, things to look out for, to make sure, you know, obviously realizing that it takes time for Google to show changes in Google Search Console. Not to worry about that. Always give it a few days to update. Sometimes Depends on how frequently it crawls your site. And yeah, and Steve is actually going to be a guest on the podcast um in the future. He's really keen to come on and chat seo and I think it'll be interesting chat to um. Yeah, see how, from the perspective of someone who's, you know, reasonably new to seo, trying to do their own thing, seeing the challenges, the successes and yeah, and where he plans to go next with it. So that's going to be really interesting and will be coming up sometime in the future. So, yeah, thanks for listening and until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 8:40

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services.

Speaker 1: 8:44

You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky Just search for Ed Dawson. On both you can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content and targeted, personalized advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.