koan - 9:38 pm on Sep 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

Here's my story: Had a 4-5 months old web site, which already had good inbound links and a PR of 4, and I decided to change domain name because it was too close to an existing company I wasn't aware at first and preemptively decided to avoid problems, since I was still relatively new. I moved my site in April 2005 and set up a 301 redirect on all my old pages in the old site using PHP redirect to the new ones. I also contact web sites that link to me asking them to update the link for the new address, which a good portion of them do. All is well for a month or two, until I realise a whole section of my old site had gone into supplemental results instead, and that section isn't being indexed in my new site. So now, those supplemental results compete with my site, beating it in SERPs, and my corresponding section in the new site is never spidered or cached or indexed. In June, with the new updates, my site has just being slowly phasing out of Google SERPs, only appearing in very exotic searches and typos. Searching for my domain name brings up people linking to me instead of my web site, even though that new site has now a PR of 5. I don't want to pay for hosting the old site forever so it is just a domain forwarding with my registrar.

It feels like moving that site has brought on the fury of sandbox and duplicate penalties on it. I can live through it for a few months, I just hope this supplemental results page mess gets cleaned up one of these days, it's rather absurd those old pages beat so many real pages in the SERP. Yahoo! and MSN never gave me any problems with moving my site. I mean, if it's all a pissing contest to get as many indexed pages in their database for marketing reasons, that's the kind of behavior we expect from old-school companies, but Google was supposed to be over the sleazy tactics. I wished it was at least for a different reason, like maybe collateral damage from spam prevention. But my site is 100% white hat, very standard compliant using structural tags like HTML is supposed to be. I'm still waiting, working on the content reguraly, improving features for the few visitors I still get. It's rather discouraging though.

PS: The new address was also inclued in the DMOZ directories around may-june, so that may be a factor with the sandbox (acquiring too many links too fast with all those directory clones out there).