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Check Those Redirects Or It Can Bite You
February 04, 2007
Recently I ran into an interesting situation with a long term client. For close to a year they enjoyed top position at Google for a very important keyphrase related to their industry. Without warning 2 weeks ago they dropped off the face of the earth for just the one phrase. They still held strong positions for all their remaining phrases and had even increased positions overall.
After some research I was able to locate what I thought could have caused the problem:
The client was using a tracking URL on a partner site to track visitors clicking through (pretty standard practice). When the user clicked through they were customarily redirected to the appropriate page. Everything seemed in order except for the fact when you pinged the www.client.com/default.aspx Google returned a result of www.client.com/default.aspx?tracking1234 and showed a duplicated version of the home page for both url's.
The partner site was using the tracking url with a text link containing the very important keyphrase the client had suddenly plummeted in Google for.
The first thing I did was to run a Header Check and found that the tracking URL was actually returning a 302 redirect to the client's home page. I consulted with the client and had them change this to a 301 redirect. Less than a week later they had regained their top position at Google for the important phrase. The tracking url has also been completely removed from the Google index.
There are many good "Header Checkers" out there. A few might be:
Stay diligent and stay on top.
Happy trails, Amigos!
see all posts by James Gunn
posted by James Gunn at February 4, 2007 10:19 PM
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