Forum Moderators: phranque
The site I ref to contains about 70 folders and over 10K files PHP and MySQL driven.
How should I be prepared for the task of URL changing?
Does the site need to be reloaded?
Actually what the whole move implies?
How will you handle the situation?
(FYI- don’t think I’ll be rude in non responding to posts I will not be back before mid pm)
Thanks
Regards
Henry
This, means that the new domain is in the SERPS i hope? I hope it's also being returned for the proper keywords?
>> but I have completely lost my PageRank, which is now ZERO
For all your pages or just some of them?
There's some anomalies with the Toolbar PR, i'm not sure exactly what's happening, but i've seen a few threads about this. Here's my best guesses:
1) Your old domain was spidered infrequently and as a result of this the change is taking longer time.
2) Google knows that your domain has been changed and is now computing your new Toolbar PR.
3) Perhaps your new domain has a penalty and Google is in the process of "neutralizing" links to the domain that was there before you bought it. See How long? [webmasterworld.com]
4) You have some issues with the robots meta tag or the robots.txt file.
5) You have an issue with "/" versus "index.htm" - use one, not both, see: Indexed pages in Google [webmasterworld.com] (msg #11; onfire)
And it might be something completely different as well. This does not need to be related to the move of website - something else might have been changed in the process, giving these related errors.
The most important thing is not your toolbar PR, it's the ranking of your pages in the SERPS. If you still rank as you should i would not worry at all. Something is taking time and i'm not sure what it is, as it can be a lot of different things, but if your ranking is still good (meaning: as expected), it will work out in the end somehow.
So, how's your ranking for your keywords? Improved/same/worse?
>> What the heck went wrong?
I think my advice might have been wrong. It might not have been wrong, but if it has i'm very sorry, especially as these threads are read by a lot of people. It's not a fatal error, though, and of course i will tell you how to correct it:
Right now, you are telling Googlebot (and everybody else) this:
old_domain.com --> 301 --> new_domain.us
old_domain.localweb.com --> 301 --> new_domain.us
This can give problems sometimes, if you have incoming links to both old domains. See redesigns, redirects, & google -- oh my! [webmasterworld.com]
The reason (afaik) is that Google sees two "websites" in the index pointing to the same new address. As only one website (or page) can be at any one address, it gets confused. One of these sites will win.
Chances are that your "localweb" has won, and that is not what you want. In these cases (merging two sites, as opposed to moving one site) you should use 302 in stead of 301. You will get "shadow urls" in the SERPS when you do a 302:
www.old_domain.com/
Similar pages ... but the backlinks and PR will transfer. That is: Whenever you point two ressources at the same URL, make one or both a 302 in stead of a 301.
>> I tried the changing the htaccess file to the following,
>> but it gave me an Internal Server Error.
>>
>> RewriteRule (.*) [new_domain.us...] [R=404,L]
There is no 404 flag, that's why. There is a 410 flag which means "Gone". This is more serious than a 404, as a 404 could be an error; a 410 is never an error, it's a deliberately deleted page that will never return. A 410 would force Google to remove the pages (and the backlinks record as well) completely from the index, so it should be used with extreme caution.
sidenote: the (.*) expression should be without parenthesis when you redirect to a specific page without matching a pattern. Parenthesis is only needed when a pattern match is done.
>> What is my best move now?
Not the 404, and definitely not the 410.
1) First month or so:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old_domain\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old_domain\.localweb\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [new_domain.us...] [R=302,L]
2) Next month or so:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old_domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [new_domain.us...] [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old_domain\.localweb\.com
RewriteRule .* [new_domain.us...] [R=302,L]
3) Rest of time:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old_domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [new_domain.us...] [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old_domain\.localweb\.com
RewriteRule .* - [R=410,L]
First you are redirecting both domains temporarily - google will factor in backlinks for both old domains to the new. Then you make a "hard" redirect for one, so that this one will win. Last, you purge the "localweb" domain completely. You could also go directly from (1) to (3) (or skip (1)).
I really hope this will solve your problems. There might still be other issues (points 1-5 above), but this will solve anything directly related to the redirect of domains i believe.
/claus
How to force or eliminate a www. subdomain on an Apache webserver
It's easy. In your root .htaccess file, add these lines:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]...to exclude the www, and these lines to force the www to be used:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]That should do it. One extra advice - don't go around making frequent changes on issues as important as these. And do whatever you choose to do consistently.
/claus
