Whenever you consider a website redesign or changing the layout of your website, there are a number of extremely important questions that you should ask yourself. For example, you should think carefully about where you are going to move your key resources or pages, what impact the shift might have on them, and how to make sure that you’re easily able to get found.
One of the factors that can be easily overlooked on this front is the
value of social sharing
, particularly factors that show up in search engines or other formats, like the number of tweets or Likes a page has gotten.
Over the last month, as we prepared to shut down the Performable website after HubSpot’s acquisition of them. We took careful stock of each of their webpages and the statistics of them, so that we could carefully measure what would happen to each of them. For each page on Performable.com’s blog, we recorded the number of views that page had in the last month, and the number of tweets, likes, LinkedIn shares, and so on for the page.
Over the last month, as we prepared to shut down the Performable website after HubSpot’s acquisition of them. We took careful stock of each of their webpages and the statistics of them, so that we could carefully measure what would happen to each of them. For each page on Performable.com’s blog, we recorded the number of views that page had in the last month, and the number of tweets, likes, LinkedIn shares, and so on for the page.
Having established our base data, we want to check on if we could take advantage of these shares in any way and preserve their value as we moved the
website
.
After we did all the redirect work on Thursday afternoon, we checked right afterwards for the social sharing stats for each of the pages for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that any of the shares passed through to the new pages. All of the new pages on the HubSpot domain showed having no social shares at all, and the old pages still showed their old data.
After we did all the redirect work on Thursday afternoon, we checked right afterwards for the social sharing stats for each of the pages for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that any of the shares passed through to the new pages. All of the new pages on the HubSpot domain showed having no social shares at all, and the old pages still showed their old data.
Putting a redirect on an old page and then pointing it to a new one didn’t move those shares through. This was somewhat a surprise to us - Since anyone who clicked on that old share or tweet still came through to the new site, we had hoped the share might come through too.
That led us to the weekend, and I checked the statistics on Monday. Something interesting had happened over the weekend though: As people occasionally tweeted the old URLs from the now-redirected Performable.com, those tweets counted towards the total tweets for the relevant page on HubSpot.com.
That led us to the weekend, and I checked the statistics on Monday. Something interesting had happened over the weekend though: As people occasionally tweeted the old URLs from the now-redirected Performable.com, those tweets counted towards the total tweets for the relevant page on HubSpot.com.
When Twitter formulates the count of tweets for a certain page, they first read the URL that was tweeted and then follow any and all redirects off of that URL. As a result, the following tweets afterwards did count towards HubSpot’s pages. It makes a lot of sense for Twitter to do this - that way, no matter what URL shortener someone chooses to use, they make sure they’re always recording the final URL that was being tweeted by someone. The fact that matters for the tweet count is the final URL that was tweeted, and not anything in between or if that URL was redirected.
For the other sites besides Twitter, none of the social sharing factors carried over at all and we didn’t notice this same phenomenon with them. Sharing addresses on the Performable blog or other parts of their site didn’t impact the sharing totals for HubSpot at all. It looks like Facebook and Google+ aren’t counting the redirects and final URLs in the same way that Twitter does as a result, or the results would have matched theirs. In summary:
For the other sites besides Twitter, none of the social sharing factors carried over at all and we didn’t notice this same phenomenon with them. Sharing addresses on the Performable blog or other parts of their site didn’t impact the sharing totals for HubSpot at all. It looks like Facebook and Google+ aren’t counting the redirects and final URLs in the same way that Twitter does as a result, or the results would have matched theirs. In summary:
| Google+ | ||||
| Passes Social Shares? | No | No | No | No |
| Reads Redirects? | Yes | No | No | No |
It's also worth mentioning that while Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn don't read the redirect when deciding where to send people, they also often don't properly realize that they are being redirected as part of the new URL. For example, if you try to share www.performable.com today on Google+, you end up with a very strange looking preview with the Performable logo and a page on HubSpot.com, as below:
If you are ever considering moving a website or a section of your website, be very conscious not just of the obvious factors, like making sure that the pages have redirects. Also be aware that there may be things that you lose or cannot control, such as losing the social shares that may exist of your current pages.
Don’t let something like this stop you from making important changes to your website or re-architecting how things are laid out, but if you need help we have a
website redesign kit
to help.
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Ken Jansen 11:21 AM on August 10, 2011
I just completed a URL redesign and found out the hard way that the social shares do not pass along. Lost all my tweets and facebook likes on the subpages where I made the changes. Great info to know for the next time around. Thankfully I only changed some subpages not my home pages, which would have been much worse. ugh.
Thank you.
Jason Keath 11:38 AM on August 10, 2011
Great read. Went through this just recently with redirecting some old socialfresh.com pages to their new home on socialfreshconference.com for our events. Luckily the main event page rebuilt plenty of likes and tweets very quickly.
A couple positive things though.
Facebook likes are still retained somewhere if the for FB ad targeting if the code was there. You could still say target everyone who like a Performable page and send them to the HubSpot blog, Facebook page, or an article explaining the benefits of the acquisition, etc.
I suspect the Google +1 might catch up a little. Since Google page caching and Pr will catch up eventually. It may not be a direct pass of X +1's from Page A to Page B, but it could help search results.
Bryn Adler 1:36 PM on August 10, 2011
This is absolutely something to take into consideration about website redesign. If the timing aligns in that you are considering a redesign, think about revising your SEO campaign and social media efforts. Or, if you're just starting to build on social media platforms, combine the efforts.
If Google's algorithm is taking into account the +1 button, Facebook likes, and LinkedIn shares, then aligning a redesign with a re-vamped social media campaign can be a good solution.
Stiforp 11:44 PM on August 10, 2011
Thanks a bunch on this article on redirects... great information and something to seriously consider.
Simon 1:47 AM on August 11, 2011
Annoying... Im pretty sure that rel=canonical canonicalises likes/shares though..
Elizabeth Kramer 8:53 AM on August 11, 2011
Discovered this the hard way too. Changed one word in a blog title and turned out to be a big mistake. Didn't even consider how it would erase all the stats. Live and learn.
Tyler Durden 11:08 AM on August 29, 2011
We did a URL rewrite on our site. We were very careful to 301 redirect all our old SEO unfriendly URLs to the new URL format. Now our Facebook Recommend widget on the front page has all the liked product pages reset. It seems that having the redirect on those liked URLs disqualified them.