Hey everyone. Young professional starting out my career in digital marketing an SEO. I`m still learning, but I have come across an issue I can`t figure out, hope someone here can help!
I found a page on my site that had a URL slug that was not optimal for the content on the page. So I stupidly decided to change the slug and create a 301 redirect to the new url.
Hypothetically lets say I changed the url from "/bicycles/red-colored-bike" to "/bicycles/red-bike." My thinking behind this was that there were several keywords we were trying to rank for that began with "red-bike..." like "red bike accessories" or "red bike tune ups" ect. ect.
So I changed the slug from "/bicycles/red-colored-bike" to "bicycles/red-bike" and created a 301 redirect from the old url to the new one. All the research I`ve read said that 301 redirects transfer about 85-90% of the page authority/link juice of the old url to the new one. So I thought that would be an acceptable loss to better increase future long-run rankings (and to make it more understandable to the user what the page was about).
However, instead of a small 10-15% drop in rankings, 2 days later the page`s rankings fell from an average of being ranked 8 - 12 for our targeted keywords to below 50. Then they only kept going down after a week had gone by.
I saw this drop, freaked out, changed the url back to the original, removed the 301 redirect, created another redirect from the new url back to the old url (in-case there were any new links created).
It`s been a week and a half and I have only seen the rankings get worse. What`s happening? And what else can I do fix this?
-Chris?
