Did over-redirecting cause a drop?

Started by rockthecasbah323@gmail.co, 01-17-2017, 11:01:14

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rockthecasbah323@gmail.coTopic starter

I have a site that had 5 internal pages ranked page 1 on P1 for their relevant terms. It's a big corporate site of over 400 pages.

Prior to starting an optimization campaign, we had redirected http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com. We also had an HTTPS version that we didn't realize was running in parallel for about 8 months.

The site had little hierarchy and about 250 pages were http://mysite.com/this-subject-page.html

We'd also been using a plugin in Wordpress that assigned .html to each page.

We decided to optimize and did the following:

First we redirected http://www.mysite.com to https://www.mysite.com

Next we added some code in htaccess to redirect each .html to /

At completion of this phase, we'd gained significantly for about 20 keywords and had 14 pages now on P1.

Following this, we did the following:

Created a hierarchy with silos for top 20 topics.
Renamed about 160 pages with new titles (they were all too long) and metadescriptions (also too long)
Moved about 100 articles under 'blog' and 'articles'

Added manual 301s for all 260 pages for ex: http://www.mysite.com/mypage became http://www.mysite.com/my-parent/-my-page/

Note: at this point, you'll notice we have redirects from http to http://www then to https: then from .html to/ then the individual pages without the .html to the final location.

We added an 'internal links' plugin and ran some rules to cross-link pages.

We added breadcrumbs.

We also implemented AMP pages.

During the execution of this last stage, our developer screwed up and caused about 100 404s and accidentally renamed 65 pages with the same title. We then kept finding and reporting incorrect redirects, more 404s and other mistakes to  her.

Our rankings plummeted to far below what they were at the start!

We then undid the internal links plugin thinking it was a factor. No change.

So question #1 is what do you think was biggest contributor to drop? 404s? Too many redirects?

Also, is there a better structure to redirect the pages?

Both Moz and SEMRush say site is incredibly well optimized now.

What else can be done to recover as rapidly as possible?

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