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It is clean as far as I can tell, but ... Google does not index it all (crawls only a couple of pages per visit), PR has stayed at 0 for one year, and the rankings are poor to say the least.
I wonder if there is some kind of light penalty behind it, but I can't figure what's wrong, since I never used bad tricks.
The only major modification from the former site is that the structure is paralleled (have added support for a second language, each page has a link to the same page in the other language).
Would greatly appreciate any tip, I am struggling to get any new link because of the PR0. Not mentionning that traffic is 10% of what it used to be. Very frustrating.
J-F
/claus
I could not put a Redirect when I switched domain (no .htaccess possible and not control over the server). I put on every page of the old domain a link to the new page and removed the old content. After a while, replaced the link by the URL in plain text just in case. The old domain still exists, pages still there with only new pages' URL in plain text as a content and "We have moved" as the title.
About 20 (?) good incoming links and total about 150-200 counting the DMOZ copies.
Do you have any text on the pages, and if not are the titles unique?
On the old site, the title is the same for all pages and there is one line of text with the new URL.
On the "new" (1-year old) site, there is some text (captions) and the titles are mostly unique (based on images' captions again). Sometimes captions are the same (same location) for a bunch of images/pages though, but that was the same on the old site. Keyword density is obviously high since there is little text, but similar to well-ranking competition.
I really appreciate your looking into it, thanks.
J-F
The old site's PR is now 4 (homepage), even though there has not been any content for ages.
After a while, replaced the link by the URL in plain text just in case.
It will also help if you can get some webmasters linking to the old pages, to update the links.
With www.alltheweb.com you can find links that google doesn't show (although Google most likely knows about these links and these links are considered for calculating the PR).
See also: hoster doesn't support .htaccess or asp [webmasterworld.com]
I checked the number of incoming links to the new site with alltheweb indeed. Another interesting thing is that Alltheweb does not spider/index the site even though it shows almost 200 incoming links. I emailed with a guy at Alltheweb who said he did not see why it was the case and since there is nothing obviously wrong with my site it had been manually added for the next update. Nothing has happened yet, though.
Then you should add the <meta refresh> tag to each page on the old site (pointing to the new site) and keep the time interval before the refresh low (max 2-5 seconds or lower). Have no other content on the page than the meta and the link, not even title.
Most important: Apply this tag to each of the old pages:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">This specifies that the page should be removed from the index and that the links on the page should be followed and indexed. Not all robots will interpret "noindex" as "remove" but Gbot does, afaik.
It will take some time. Then again, you have been waiting for long already. Keep it for a few months just to be sure, then delete all pages on the old site altogether. Keep the front page redirect (for a while more) if you wish.
/claus
I agree.
The only explanation i can think of is that there are still some remains of the old site somewhere in the system, and that they somehow get confused, as the old pages still exist (albeit without content). Otherwise there's always the hard way, deleting it all and returning just 404's (and ultimatively, stopping DNS for the old domain and returning a DNS error). The "noindex" is the polite way if you can't make a 301 on the server.
/claus
