Ok, first I will illustrate the issue. One fine day my vistior count dropped. At first I thought it was due to Google Sandboxing or penalizing my site. But when i searched the net I found that I was still having the same ranking. But I wan in for a huge shock when I opened my Sites Google Webmaster. My site had more than 3300+ links/pages as "URLS not followed". When I saw the detail everyone of the error showed "Redirect Error". Now I was clear why my Rankings dropped. Now there lies the real problem which creates the Redirect error. Google uses our feed as Sitemap. The problem with the current system is that my site feed is redirected to feed burner which inturn is redirected to "feedburner google" feed. Earlier all worked fine as Google never cared about re-directs. Now it looks like Google is carefully avoiding links with more than one re-direct.
I will first illustrate why this porblem arised and then give the solutions. My blog is hosted on Blogger and I have made the Site feed point to my Feedburner feed. Recently Google forced me to transfer my feedburner feeds to google. It was a pretty smooth transition and I didn't lose a single user as Google already redirected my feedburner feed to Google feed. Everything worked fine till Google changed their crawling algorithm. If you go to Google webmaster site, tools options and click "Analyse Robot.txt" you can see your current Robot.txt. For a Blogger blog, it will be similiar to:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://www.xxxxxx.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
So the solution is simple make your site feed pointed to your google feed. i.e go to feedburner.google.com and copy the address of your feed and put it in your blog feed (Layout->settings-->Site Feed). This will solve the issue. But it will take minimum of to weeks to de-list all your URLs from Not followed. But finally my site traffic has picked up.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
How to Solve the Redirect Error in Google Webmaster
Labels:
Blogger Tips,
webmaster fix
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8 comments:
Thanx a lot to solve my big problem
hi this is Sans.........
its a new link just go through
SEO Services
Thanks for solving my proble i like this site for giveing this opertunity
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webdesign
Thanks for your solution It takes to me a long time to find problem. Thanks you so much
well nice blogger ..
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non voice projects
What about web sites..???!!
This particular solution is for blogs, especially the blogger ones. I am not sure about websites. Websites usually should not face these problems as the sitemap is generated by webmasters themselves. Blogger blogs don't have that problem.
hey i got the same error and i havn't put feed url in my robots.txt but i put xml sitemap url i.e. mysite.com/sitemap.xml
so can u plz tell me wht should i have to do!! should i have to remove xml sitemap url frm my robots.txt?
thanx
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