Digital Masters Magazine

Home of Digital Masters

  • Design
  • Photo
  • Video
  • Web
  • Code
  • UX
  • Mobile
Home Miscellaneous SEO secrets to rank you high: make sure Google respects your 301 (permanent) redirects
SEO secrets to rank you high: make sure Google respects your 301 (permanent) redirects

February 16, 2016 By Digital Masters 3 Comments

SEO secrets to rank you high: make sure Google respects your 301 (permanent) redirects

If you had to implement a bunch of permanent redirects (301) you may wonder if Google is respecting them. This  is of paramount importance for your SEO rank, as Google is known to penalize content duplicates. When the SEO karma of a page is split due to duplicates, the ranking of all URLs tanks.

You may still be seeing legacy page URLs in Google Webmaster Tools as if no redirect had ever been put in place. These discontinued, legacy URLs seem to keep generating page views at a lower page rank no matter what you do. Unnerving, isn’t it? The question is: how do you find out if there is anything that can or needs to be done?

The easiest way to verify whether the web server is sending a 301 redirect for any particular resource (or something entirely different is happening) is to view the HTTP headers it is sending for the URI (see this post for details on how to do this). Once you confirm that a 301 redirect is indeed in place use the content drill-down feature in your web analytics suite of choice to view user activity.

Confirm redirect

In Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages for your site, find the old version and the new version of the URL you are concerned about, and look at a time frame that includes your original setup of the redirect.

Effects of a 301 redirect in Google Analytics: the old page no longer receives visitors after the redirect
Effects of a 301 redirect in Google Analytics: the old page no longer receives visitors after the redirect

If the old page no longer shows any page views while the new URL performs at a comparable (or even a higher) level, everything is working fine and you have nothing to worry about. Relax.

Effects of a 301 redirect in Google Analytics: after the redirect only the new page shows visitors
Effects of a 301 redirect in Google Analytics: after the redirect only the new page shows visitors

If you would like to verify that your redirects for NGINX are up to snuff, see this post:

RegEx Bliss: Set Up URL Redirects in NGINX Using Regular Expressions without Rewrites!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Tip of the Day, Webmasters' Insights Tagged With: Google Analytics, redirects, SEO

Comments

  1. Marilyn says

    February 27, 2016 at 2:59 am

    Good day! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be okay.

    I’m undoubtedly enjoying your blog and look forward to new updates.

    Reply
    • admin says

      March 1, 2016 at 4:13 am

      Hi Marilyn, Thank you for your encouraging words. Yes, we are on Twitter, handle: @4digitalU. Let’s stay in touch!
      You are in digital marketing. That’s a growing industry, and one that we dearly love!

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. RegEx Bliss: Set Up URL Redirects in NGINX Using Regular Expressions without Rewrites | Cloud Insidr says:
    February 21, 2016 at 5:47 am

    […] To verify if your 301 redirects are working, check out this post: SEO Secrets: How to Verify that Google Respects Your 301 (and 302) Redirects, Ranking-Wise. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Treat yourself to the best of our content

Courtesy of our friends at substackapi.com

Manhattan beauty

Is this your cup of AI?

Speed is everything: shiny car engine rendering

How to force an older PC to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11 when it refuses to go along for the ride

Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash

The tech revolt. Say goodbye to your favorite search engine that’s been wasting your precious clicks on silly captchas

Change language settings in Adobe Photoshop 2020

How to change the language of Adobe Photoshop

Apple MacBook Pro (16-Inch, 16GB RAM, 1TB Storage) - Space Gray

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro: Faster, slightly heavier but still ultra-light and #WorthTheWait

Change language settings in Adobe Photoshop 2020

If you want to run any of your apps of the Adobe Creative Cloud in another language, you have come to the right place. (There is no need to purchase another license; this is just a setting of your current install.)

Apple MacBook Pro (16-Inch, 16GB RAM, 1TB Storage) - Space Gray

Apple’s new 16-inch MacBook Pro sports even cooler looks than its predecessor. It is also truly different.

What’s up

ActionScript Adobe Adobe CC All-in-One WP Migration Angular 2 Apache Apple assistive technology Belarc Advisor bootable Windows 10 Upgrade DVD crawl disabilities DNG Download tool now Dreamweaver Event Viewer Google GPU HTML iOS iPhone JavaScript Microsoft Windows 10 OpenSSH OS X PayPal performance photos Photoshop PHP product key RAW RSS SEO speed SSD Tim Cook TypeScript upgrade deadline Wall Street Windows Windows 10 Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update Windows 10 free upgrade WordPress

Categories

  • Home
  • Subscribe
  • Advertise
  • Privacy Policy
  • Legal
  • Contact Us

Copyright © 2025 ·Streamline Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress · Log in