3 replies to this topic

[AndrewP]

Hi, and thanks in advance. This looks like a very helpful forum. I haven't seen a question quite like mine in the forums.

After my new site was live for a number of months, I decided to move it to a subfolder as follows:

www.example.com ->
www.example.com/boston

There were several reasons for doing this. One was for geo recognition as a Boston site. Another was because I expect to support multiple cities in the future, so since I will need a structure like this eventually I figured it was better to start now.

Since it is just a single site right now, and since I didn't want to insert an extra page in the way of visitors, I created a 301 redirect in .htaccess from www.example.com/* to www.example.com/boston/*. Everything is working fine. The /boston subfolder always correctly appears whenever viewing the site.

The problem I'm having is that the search engines appear to be confused. My PR of 4 came back within a few days, but nothing else seems quite right. They (Google, Bing) list both the / and /boston URLs in search results, even though I made this change over a month ago and their caches for my pages were updated within the last couple of weeks. Does this make any sense? Also, certain backlinks seems to have disappeared. And Bing no longer likes my sitemap. Those may be unrelated, but I thought I'd mention them.

I'm wondering if I made a mistake with this 301 redirect to a subfolder, or if I just need to be patient a while longer to let the SEs figure things out? If the latter, is there anything I can do to help them along faster?

On a related note, from a link juice point of view, does it matter if backlinks point to / or to /boston, since they are effectively the same due to the 301 redirect?

Many Thanks,

Andrew

[Jill]

Sounds like you mistakenly have a 302 redirect rather than a 301. Run it through an http server header checker to see for sure. But I'd be surprised if that wasn't your issue.

[AndrewP]

Sounds like you mistakenly have a 302 redirect rather than a 301. Run it through an http server header checker to see for sure. But I'd be surprised if that wasn't your issue.

Thanks for the quick reply, Jill. I just double-checked here: www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool. It is a 301 header.

Is it possibly normal for Google & Bing to display the main domain for a site in search results even if it's been 301 redirected? Most results do show www.example.com/boston, as desired. There's just a few that show up in Google and Bing without /boston.

Really, though, I'm most concerned about backlinks being counted properly. I have some pointing to www.example.com and some to www.example.com/boston. Any suggestions for how to help the SEs interpret things correctly?

Thanks again,

Andrew

[Jill]

It's it's really a 301 then it will be interpreted correctly.

You most likely just need to give it some more time.