I chose 3 long-tail keyword phrases to track for that post, and then flipped the switch and changed the URL
Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2024 8:47 am
Manipulating URLs (non-301) My plan started out simple: manipulate a URL on my blog and rename it to use a date-based format (as some blogs do by default). So, for example, a URL that normally looked like thisecame something like this.-goes-here I chose a blog post that was recent enough to still be archived and spidered but not so recent or popular that it was likely to attract new inbound links.
In part 1 of this experiment, I did not 301 the old URL to the ne jordan mobile phone numbers database w one. By not 301’ing, I was hoping to nudge Google into updating the original cache date. The graph below shows what happened: Rankings without 301 The rankings axis is inverted to show low rankings at the top, with 1 line for each keyword phrase.
Here’s where things got weird. Even after spiders indexed the new URL, that URL showed up in rankings on 3 different days for the 3 phrases (indicated by the gray, dotted lines). Some rankings dropped before the new URL appeared, others after, until they eventually stabilized slightly lower than the original URLs. Oddly, the one keyword that hit #1 after the switch also managed to cache the 404-error (so, that ranking was completely useless). 2.
In part 1 of this experiment, I did not 301 the old URL to the ne jordan mobile phone numbers database w one. By not 301’ing, I was hoping to nudge Google into updating the original cache date. The graph below shows what happened: Rankings without 301 The rankings axis is inverted to show low rankings at the top, with 1 line for each keyword phrase.
Here’s where things got weird. Even after spiders indexed the new URL, that URL showed up in rankings on 3 different days for the 3 phrases (indicated by the gray, dotted lines). Some rankings dropped before the new URL appeared, others after, until they eventually stabilized slightly lower than the original URLs. Oddly, the one keyword that hit #1 after the switch also managed to cache the 404-error (so, that ranking was completely useless). 2.