Ruin your SEO with bad redirects. How to do it right

Redirects is a serious thing. The more organic referring traffic you have the more dangerous is doing it badly.

I've told that again and again to customers but you know how things are going. Or the communication chain along the people involved breaks at some point or the technical guy in charge doesn't care at all sending your recommendations to trash can.

This article illustrates what happened in one of those cases.

How redirect disaster happened

During the period you see in graph about 68% of the traffic was organic so the business model relied on that in a relevant percentage.

In the middle of December organic traffic remarkably goes up due to the SEO job done previously. From 8.000 visits to 14.500 weekly average. Fantastic!

We were preparing the redirects plan when suddenly the webmaster changed most of the URLs of the site to more friendly ones from one day to another without any redirect and not saying a word. Tilt!

Scope of damage

In absolute numbers: from Wednesday 13 Feb. 2.327 visits to 462 visits on Friday 15, just 2 days later.

Yes, friendly URLs were the objective but all the indexed pages at search engines were leading visits non existing pages so organic roller coaster went down at speed of light completely ruining our previous successful efforts and client money. Telephones ringed as hell!

Solution

How that was faced? Injecting more money asap on paid search, Adwords, to keep the traffic from search engines at same level. Sometimes running forward is the only option.

Taking in consideration that the site is a 'renting apartments for tourists' business and it occurred in the highest season (after Christmas period) the number of bookings went to a ridiculous close to nothing plus the expensive solution, the amount of money wasted was considerable.

Seems search engines react quite lazy after tickle them so much. They need first to reindex all the site and then they like to keep it at purgatory awhile to reconsider in calm if the site deserve the previous relevance.

How to do redirects right

Ok, how to work out redirects without falling into the abyss?

• Essential, good knowledge of the rewrite module syntax at your server
• Fundamental, regular expressions to write less rules specially at large sites with tons of URLs to redirect

Before writing a single line of code, get everything under control:

• Make a list in a spreadsheet (Calc or Excel) of all the URLs of the site to be redirected in a column, Xenu's Link Sleuth can help a lot
• Also a list of the backlinks to preserve traffic from referrals, relevance and PageRank, I like to use Spy Glass
• Beside it list the new ones correspondently
• Try to create patterns, URLs typologies in order to write less code using regular expressions
• Order that list by relevance and select a group of not so important to start testing
• Write the rewriting rules at .htacces or http.ini

Afterwards:

• Test that small group, verifying everything goes ok and keeping an eye to server error log looking for 404 errors, your best friend in this adventure
• Keep on going ahead step by step as you are sure the previous is working fine
• Don't forget to check if they are 301 redirects. No other is valid or you will go to purgatory to expiate your SEO sins

You are warned now. Good luck!