Something shady has happened to my SEO, and I don’t know how to get out of it!

#473371
  • Resolved Wakesquare

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Good morning,

    I would like to share this story with you for opinions, advice and solutions. I will try to be as short as possible. Thanks in advance!

    Small preamble: this story is about an ecommerce site (dropshipping merchandising sale) + SEO blog to do affiliate marketing among the main reasons. Starting from 0 organic visits we have had an exponential growth in about 2 years, reaching a potential volume of visits from organic search of 1500 months (for the reference niche we know that they are good results). We currently have about a hundred products and 120 articles in the blog (80% of these articles have at least 1 keyword positioned on the front page in the top 9 results, so we have many different articles that manage to bring traffic daily – instead the pages of the ecommerce however does not have a great ranking.

    Having said that, let me explain briefly: the site in question was originally built on wpmultisite in order to take advantage of the multilevel structure, but after 2 years of development and SEO growth where everything was going well, we decided to migrate the site to wpsingle as wpmultisite didn’t help us at all and was creating complications and conflicts with some plugins. The operation was successful, apparently everything was perfect, but only after 40 days we realized that for some reason the Rankmath plugin after the migration changed the url structure of the site shortening the directory hierarchy (e.g. original url: mysite.com / blog / article – e.g. modified url: mysite.com/ article). The fact is that we didn’t notice all this time because most of the 404 bad links that were generated also automatically resolved with a redirect function, so the search console only recognized bad links related to a module canvas of our theme and without thinking too much the technician had simply corrected them without realizing what was happening …

    Now about 40 days later we are in the great dilemma of what to do to solve this situation because we have noticed that Google has now started indexing and positioning the new urls in place of the previous ones (we do not know how many exactly) and in some cases the positioning of the new url matches the old positioning (e.g. an article was placed in third position for a certain keyword with the old url> now the new url seems to have the same positioning for the same keyword). In any case, it is clear that we have had a decline when viewing the analytics and the search console, but at this point I no longer know what the best solution can be: I modify the Rankmath configuration to restore the original structure of the site (we had just evaluated in advance not to shorten the url) even if it’s been all this time? Or to avoid further problems with the SEO of the site, it would be preferable not to change things again?

    Given the situation, if we decide to go back to the original url structure, how long can it take to restore the rankings? The fact that the url has only been shortened but the final slug of the pages has always remained the same, can it lead to a faster re-indexing of the original urls?

    Thank you very much for your availability, any opinion could be really enlightened for us.

    Greetings
    Federico F.

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
  • Nigel

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Rank Math business

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Rank Math for help with recovering from a website URL structure change and sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you.

    The best solution in the event of a URL structure change is to create redirects from the old URL to the live URL. In your case, that would be the URL structure your website had just after the website migration. When you create a redirect, most if not all of the ranking signals are transferred from the source to the destination soon after the redirect is crawled, and the new URL is indexed by Google.

    In short, keep whatever URL structure you have now and create 301 redirects from other versions. Your website will eventually recover any lost traffic from the URL changes. You can refer to the following video for more information: https://youtu.be/FHjVmi1tkEw

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have questions.

    Wakesquare

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi Nigel

    OK all clear. But I only have two questions:

    – google has already updated the indexes with the new urls, so do you think the 301 redirect is still necessary in this case?

    – or in your opinion, in order to recover the old structure because in our opinion it is more adequate, it might be a good idea to set the 301 redirects of the new urls to the old urls after restoring the old url structure? Or do you now advise us not to carry out this operation? Could it be penalizing?

    Nigel

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Rank Math business

    Hello,

    do you think the 301 redirect is still necessary in this case?

    Yes, the 301 redirects will still be necessary for websites other than Google that may have the old version of your URL.

    it might be a good idea to set the 301 redirects of the new urls to the old urls after restoring the old url structure?

    Ideally, you should not change the current URL structure unless you believe it is better for your website. If you still wish to proceed with changing the URL structure back to the original, it will only affect your website for the short to medium term, just be sure to create

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have questions.

    Wakesquare

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi Nigel, I wanted to know if the automatic redirect feature (in the settings section decicata to redirects) applies rule 301 or 302 according to the “redirect type” setting chosen in the configuration?

    Jeremy

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Hello,

    By default, Rank Math applies a 301 type redirection for the fallback behavior you set. You may also apply a different redirection type code if you prefer that way.

    Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

    Wakesquare

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Rank Math free

    can you tell me if the autoredirect function has retroactive effect (in case of previous url changes), after having activated it?

    Jeremy

    2 years, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    Yes, once you change a post’s permalink, Rank Math automatically creates a 301 redirection. This will avoid Search engines from crawling into the old permalink that generates a 404 since you have changed it.

    Hope that helps.

    Thank you.

    Wakesquare

    2 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    Thank you for your assistance,

    I wanted to take the opportunity to ask you for a suggestion for some regex rules that we should apply since the url structure of a large part of the site has migrated.

    I report exactly the urls that need 301 regex redirects.

    1) All blog articles

    from: https://mysite.com/blog/title-article/
    at: https://mysite.com/title-article/

    2) All blog archives

    from: https://mysite.com/blog/category/title-category/
    at: https://mysite.com/category/title-category/

    3) All ecommerce products

    from: https://mysite.com/market/title-product/
    at: https://mysite.com/prodotto/title-product/

    Would you be kind enough to tell us the exact rules (Regex source URL – Destination URL) for these three redirects

    Thank you very much for your kind assistance

    Reinelle

    2 years, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    Please try these regex redirects for those URLs:

    1&2. All blog articles and archives

    Source: blog/(.*)
Destination: /$1

    3. All ecommerce products

    Source: market/(.*)
Destination: /prodotto/$1

    And here’s a link on how to use regex redirects:
    https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-use-regex-redirects/

    Hope that helps.

    Thank you.

    Wakesquare

    2 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    so you’re telling me this rule

    Source: blog/(.*)
    Destination: /$1

    does it work directly for both archives and articles?

    Wakesquare

    2 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    sorry I didn’t think about it

    it is obvious that I have to do like this in this case:

    blog/category/(.*)
    /$1

    so it worked.

    Thank you very much!

    Jeremy

    2 years, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    We are glad that it is now working on your end. Do you have any other questions or do you want us to mark this as solved?

    Thank you.

    RankBot

    2 years ago

    Hello,

    Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.

    If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.

    Thank you.

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)

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