Why is our old site still getting high Page Rankings?

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Why is our old site still getting high Page Rankings?

pat2004

2:02 pm on Apr 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

My company switched from being a .org to .com a couple of years ago. We set up a permanent redirect so that people coming to the old site would automatically be redirected. The new site runs off a separate IP address. At the time we had a lot of sites linking to us and we still do even though we have tried to get them to switch over.

Now, the question is why does the Google results page still list our .org site at the top when I carry out a search on most of our keywords? And then sometimes it lists the .com site. And are they competing against each other?

We don't want to ditch the redirect otherwise we risk falling off altogether. Has anyone else had this problem or can suggest a solution?

Thanks!

Yidaki

5:32 pm on Apr 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

>We set up a permanent redirect

I know you said permanent but are you realy sure, it IS permanent (301)? Did you check the site with the Server Header Check [searchengineworld.com] or a similar tool?

What gets redirected - everything or just some directories / pages? How do you redirect - htaccess / mod_rewrite? Care to post the exemplified rewrite rules?

mod_rewrite example:


Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/robots.txt
RewriteRule (.*) http[b]:[/b]//www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

What about robots.txt? Did you put a robots.txt at the old site that disallows all bots?

robots.txt example:


User-agent: *
Disallow: /

And how many links go to the new .com domain compared to the old .org domain? Are still most of the links going to the old domain? Or are the links to the old .org domain higher pr links than those to .com?

pat2004

6:20 pm on Apr 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

Yes, it's a 301. We checked using the Server Header check and got status: HTTP/1.1 301 Object Permanently moved.

This is the code that covers the redirect:

Sub SafeRedir(ByVal URL)
Response.Buffer = True
Response.Status = "301 Object Permanently moved"
Response.AddHeader "Location", URL
Response.Write "<HTML><Head>"
Response.Write "<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT=""0;URL=" & URL & """>"
Response.Write "<Script>window.location='" & URL & "';</Script>"
Response.Write "</Head>"
Response.Write "</HTML>"
End Sub

We don't have a robots.txt on our old site.

We do have more links going to the old site than the new one - do you think this is the ultimate problem? I have tried to contact a lot of these sites to ask them to update their links but haven't had much luck.

Yidaki

7:29 pm on Apr 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

I'm not sure how vbscript / asp works but i'd say this line

301 Object Permanently moved

should read

301 Moved Permanently

What i've also observed is the fact that addtional lines after the

Response.AddHeader "Location", URL

can cause problems. It leads to an output that includes the Content-Length header field and normaly a redirect header ends with the location line, not with any additional Content-Length info. Content-Length means, there is content and a redirect usually has no content.

Why do you output the <html> section with the meta + the script anyway? You wouldn't need this - normally. If google reads the additional meta refresh, the site stays in the index. That's how google treats meta refresh. You should get rid of it.

I can't find any recent information about the SafeRedir script so it looks a bit outdated or at least very, very rare to me. Are you able to change the old domain to a simple apache server and use htaccess / mod_rewrite?

I tend to bet, your problems would be solved then ...