A 301 forwards traffic and referrer also SO while Google could still be listing the old page, you would see the traffic going to the new one. JavaScript cannot see redirects (as they happen server-side and JS kicks in when the page is loaded) so Analytics will track both traffic and keywords as coming directly to that page… So ranking for certain keywords is a different things compared to having the keywords in the referrer as traffic is transparently redirected by the web-server due to the 301.

And the loss of ranking of the result of the update. It takes 1-2 weeks to take a page out of SERPs. And that’s when you lost your momentum. If you had links with proper anchor text, you could have kept on ranking. But you say you didn’t.

When you do a 301, you need to make sure they keywords are found in the final page. And usually, if you want to keep the traffic, it should be optimized for them. Redirecting to a relatively irrelevant page compared to the original one will cancel the traffic.

PS: Playing with 301 is not very easy! 🙂

Google was using the old title and meta description of the prior page, but swapping out the destination URL. Bounce rates to the home page were higher when it ranked for the long tail terms (I segmented by keywords, but as you may suspect, it was within ‘not provided’) . It’s a pretty clear sign that a user landed on the home page, they were not getting what they expected – and hence bouncing back to the SERPS for “X vs Y” types of queries for a better result.

The homepage no longer ranks for any “X vs Y” queries. As of today, I’ve yet found any inbound anchor text with those keywords across Ahrefs, Majestic, and Moz, so it’s pretty safe to assume that external links not a confounding variable to this case study.