Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

We have just had our hosting upgraded by our hosting company which involved moving our site to another server (and IP). They forgot to set the default priority on default.asp, and Google was doing a crawl just at the time of the changeover (it's also co-incided with the wierd update thing that's going on at the moment). I now have both duplicate listings back, and traffic has dropped again. I have written to Google advising them of the update to our site, and the 301 is back up again. They have just done a 2 day long crawl of our site again, but no traffic back as yet, too early to tell though.

Thanks

The intermediate step, at domain.com/folder/ will kill your listings. Lucklily, this effect is very easy to see if you use Xenu LinkSleuth to check your site: it shows up as reporting double the number of pages (when you generate the sitemap) that you actually have, with half of the pages having a title of "301 Moved".

I agree with you and others that 301s *sometimes* cause problems or are not handled properly by search engines, but I think they are still the best way to go based on comments by many posters and search engineers from Google, Yahoo, and ASK at the WebmasterWorld conference.

I have also heard some say they work perfectly as well, so I would agree then that it's a gamble, luck of the draw.

If anything, my SERPs positions improved after that, but its impossible to tell
if that was due to other causes or not. -Larry

However, I trust the Google engineers talking at WebmasterWorld and SES who made it VERY clear that 301s are the way to go to avoid canonical confusion, 302 problems, and redirection problems.

I haven't bothered to get many links to point to the new URL.

I must assume, that though the sandbox was applied to the new domain, that google is now filtering in over time, links from the old site to the new.

How so, I mean what are your indications that rankings are on the move? Just wondering if you have been released from the sandbox or if you are in a low demand sector... how many results are returned when you find your listing?

Also notice how much writing there has been lately (1 years time) about 301, 302, hijacking, omitted results, supplemental resuls, bla bla, thats not just bulltalk, here are many experience webmasters here and trust me this must be a HUGE problem for google or they would have fixed it or if they fix it somethng els will be messed up.

I'm cautiously optimistic at this point.

Are these terms on new pages by chance?

Amazingly enough, I checked and all these sites are indexed by google yet my site is banned? Most of the websites have the exact same content and design. The only difference is the domain name.

Just ran another check on some phrases I track related to blogs posts (my site has a blog and an RSS feed). Those phrases are now starting to appear in Google SERPs as well. This makes me wonder if the new blog search isn't somehow helping to pull my site out of the sandbox.

Not amazing results, from 400+ to 175 but a definite improvement.

errorsamac, we just did exactly what you're speaking of to a php site 2 days ago. (We made the inside pages url friendly)The index page stayed the same. So now all 160 of the internal pages 404. A scary situation, but we figured better to do it now than later. So our stats were mainly 404's yesterday, yet the visitors click thru the custom 404 anyway. So we didn't lose visitors. It should be interesting how G responds to this. Last year in November we did a script change that changed all the inside URL's and we lost all the inside PR, but G picked up on it within 2 weeks. So we are curious as how big G will handle it this year. I'll let you know.

So, this evening the new URL's are starting to appear in the Google serps, with a cache date of Sept 25, and the 404's are few in our stats, mostly from Yahoo and MSN. So it only took 5 days, from the 19th to the 26th for G to find our new URLS. The site has a PR 4. We feel like the new urls have been included in one database so far, and will be fed into the other databases.

We didn't use any 301's or redirects.

Wow, what an expirement! Congrads on a smooth transtition and please keep me posted... long term on this will indeed be interesting to follow.

Will keep you posted.

So now... we wait on the next PR update.

[edited by: Sweet_Cognac at 12:24 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2005]

Any thoughts?

The keyword ranking is on 1st page of results for any keyword phrases involving business name and city but not for any other keywords but this may be due to the site still less than 1 year old, i.e., sandbox. At least Google got the 301 redirects correct.

I took the custom 404 out of my .htaccess, but things have been very bumpy with that site (for whatever reasons) for a year now.

from a usabilty standpoint thats a bad idea.
you should have a custom 404 page that says "this page could not be found" and offers a site map or search feature.