301 redirect and pages dropped out of index

301 redirect

[Jenn77]

Hi, I'm back to square one I guess in trying to determine why most of the internal pages on a site have been dropped from the index. There were some page names that were changed, so 301's are in place, along with a server move. I initially thought that it may be a problem with sessions since the pages in question set a cookie with a sessionid but someone on the board was kind enough to let me know that google doesn't use cookies so I guess this shouldn't have had an effect.

To further add to the issue, when we moved servers, the hosting company mistakenly setup another domain on the server that pointed to our mainsite, so we could possibly be hit with a duplicate penalty on internal pages, although as soon as we discovered this we asked the host to fix this and the domain that was incorrectly pointing to the main site was removed and taken offline. The main domain has a PR6, and is a popular site, up for many years and well visited, with more content then the sites that are currently coming up in the index for the topic at hand. The strange thing is that the other pages of the site are coming up fine, it's just one type of page that is missing.

It is really causing a problem because it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and I'm not sure where to start. Would you recommend writing to Google just in case there is some kind of inner page penalty that was applied during the server move and if so, what is the best email address to use to try to get a real person's response? Thanks so much for the help.

[asinah]

Faced the same problems 2 months back while moving my server. It will take about 1 or 2 months before your site will be up again.

Just take easy and check frequently if the googlebot is visiting your site.