Search and Social

301 Redirects, site migration and Google Toolbar Page Rank

July 26th, 2008

Any SEO you talk to will tell you that Google’s toolbar PageRank is pretty much useless as an indicator of your SEO prowess. The best metrics for your SEO effort is traffic. These same people will likely agree that in lieu of anything else, sometimes you need to look at Page Rank to get a beat on what is going on how your site is viewed by the Goog.

So, I don’t know, about 4 months ago a site the I help out with SEO from time to time changed domains. The site’s original domain was old and had a ton of links pointing to it. I should point out that the domain move was not an SEO decision but one SEO was going to have to deal with.

So as best practices will tell you, and anyone worth their weight in SEO, when you move a page (www.pageA.com becomes www.pageB.com) you should use the 301 redirect. We did that and for the most part rankings and traffic stayed constant, but there was one thing that made me nervous. According to Google’s toolbar PR the home page went from a 5+ before the move to no rank after the move.

My suspicion was that Google hadn’t created a toolbar PageRank for this page yet, but it would come the next time they update their toolbar PageRank.

Sure enough, Matt Cutt’s just posted on his blog that Google had pushed out a toolbar update. After reading that I checked the PR for the recently migrated site and I’m happy to report that in addition to traffic and rankings the PageRank is back to normal.

So not much news here.  Other than if you’ve recently moved domains and traffic from search and rankings have stayed fairly level but you have no PageRank chances are that everything is fine and you will get your PageRank back when the next update is pushed out. And really if everything stays level or goes up everything is fine since you’re doing SEO for traffic, not PageRanks or even rankings.

One final note on using the 301 redirect during a site migration. 1. Yahoo takes a while to pick up and index all the 301 redirects. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer to count your inbound links you will likely not see all of them for some time. Even if you’re new URLs are indexed and ranking. Don’t worry, your links are still there and your probably getting credit for them. Your rankings haven’t changed so it’s safe to assume the search engines are still correctly attributing links to your old URLs links to your new URLs.  Thanks 301.

Entry Filed under: SEO