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Last week we migrated our legacy site to a new site created via WordPress. I implemented all 301 redirects, but a lot of them were done improperly by my developer.

As such, a lot of pages were pointing to a root category (http://www.example.com/how-children-develop/) instead of the proper page. Now this "how children develop" page is indexed and serving for search terms that I used to rank really well for, but much lower in the SERPs. That said, my organic traffic has gone from ~800 visits per day to ~100 and keeps falling.

I've fixed all of the improper redirects (did this on Tuesday) and added the proper ones, but my rankings are not rebounding. Am I going to recover from the wrong 301 redirects?

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Am I going to recover from the wrong 301 redirects?

The answer is: Yes.

As for when: Never clear.

The greatest aspect of dealing with SEO & redirects & practically anything on a website is an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure.

And the issue right now is getting Google, Bing, Yahoo & others to properly reindex your content. The reality is they are not going to drop what they are doing to reindex quickly based on mistakes that were made. Their job is to index. A webmaster’s job is to ensure that a switchover retains & addresses indexing issues properly.

I have worked on projects where stuff like this clears up after a few days. In other cases it has taken months.

Sorry you are in this situation but truly the best you can do is to perhaps login to Google Webmaster tools & request reindexing of pages. But again, don’t expect this change to happen overnight.

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    You made my anxiety level drop significantly - thank you! You are absolutely right about an ounce of prevention = pound of cure. Unfortunately my developer made the mistake -- and I'm stuck with fixing it :( I resubmitted the sitemap in hopes that this will speed up the process. Would it also be helpful to fetch the OLD urls so that they can be reindexed with the correct 301 redirect? I'm thinking I may want to do this for the top 10 pages or so that lost the most traffic. Thanks again, Jenna
    – user33918
    Nov 21, 2013 at 18:19
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    Thanks! Everything you are saying is good. Do them. But while you say your developer did it, you need to be on top of stuff like that & make it a point of whatever work agreement you have with them.
    – Giacomo1968
    Nov 21, 2013 at 18:42
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    Don't be too hard on your developer. It is very easy to make mistakes like this. Most developers also don't know the consequences of such mistakes. Have your developer implement some sort of automated website quality assurance tests that can catch issues like this before they go live.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Nov 21, 2013 at 19:50

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