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I seem to remember reading here somewhere that this results in a sandboxing again (treated as a new site).
Can anyone confirm or deny?
Thanks,
TJ
moved a site recently and the traffic has not moved an inch
That seems to go against the grain of what you said in the thread, apache redirects - google friendly [webmasterworld.com]. In that thread, the poster only want's to remap the same domain with 301s(I'm assuming 301). Not trying to contradict, just interested in the subject.
Marty
There seem to be a few ways to do it i.e.
RedirectPermanent / [domain.com...]
or
redirect 301 / [domain.com...]
Any preference on which to use?.
TIA
TJ, we tried it three months ago with a small site that was not well linked to, and no sign of that site yet. But, even before the so called sandbox, we sometimes saw that much time go by before recovering - if an entire site was 301'd. FWIW.
Since posting that, I've kind of subscribed to the idea (for no other reason that it just makes sense to me) that the "sandbox" effect, assuming it does exist and isn't just something else at work (if anything at all other than our imagination ;-)) relates to the age of inbound links rather than the age of a domain or page.
So, on that basis I suspect, and Brett seems to indicate this with his experience, that the existing links that are out of the sandbox will remain unaffected by the 301.
And the more I think about how that would work, the more it makes sense as the obvious way for google to approach teh rapid creation of inbound links problem.
TJ
So, on that basis I suspect, and Brett seems to indicate this with his experience, that the existing links that are out of the sandbox will remain unaffected by the 301.
This doesn't quite explain it, at least not in my experience. A client redid a site and went to a new company name and new domain name about 6 weeks ago. We kept the optimization the same, and I redirected the site with 301s. Most of the roughly 100 inbounds have been in place for well over a year, perhaps several years. The company makes technical software and is a leader in its field, and most of the links are from prominent sources in that field, themed, blue-chip, etc etc.
We were in the top 5 for just about all of our desired phrases. Now we don't show up in the top 100 for any of the old phrases. We do rank as #1 for the new company name.
Our Toolbar PR now shows as all white, or too low for me to detect any green.
For the inside pages, the difference could be a local rank thing... ie, we were ranking because of our internal navigation anchor text, and these might now be seen as new links.
This doesn't cover the Toolbar PR0, though, or the drop in the index page rankings, where we've left the content pretty much the same, with the inbound links established and still unchanged.
PS - I should mention that about 10 days ago I once saw the index page ranking at about #35 for our main phrase as Google picked up the new domain, but that's now dropped way down.
Revenue of this site decrease by 90%. Consider twice when you want to change domain name.
Been there... In March, I 301 redirected to a new domain to move away from the spammy looking 3-hyphen domain I had. It took a full 10 weeks (to the day) to show up in Google again. My revenue dropped by 80% and traffic was cut by the same. Thank goodness for Yahoo, else I would have been put out of business.
It was tough, but I'm glad i did it.
You have to use the 301 redirect to tell Google that the old URL is no longer valid and to use the new one in its place.
However, many people set this up as a 302 redirect and cause themselves a big problem. Use a HTTP header sniffer to verify exactly what code is returned when trying to accesss the old site.
Please update your links, and click here to access to ....
A safe solution is to test the requested domain name, and only do the redirect if the old domain is requested:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.old-domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.new-domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Jim
Why is authoritative content which ranks #1 on one domain worth nothing when moved to a new domain? Everything was properly 301'd, the new pages have long ago been indexed and the old domain's pages have been culled from the index. GoogleGuy?
<added>As I read the first sentence, it seems confusing.
Olddomain.com/regionaldirectory 301'd to regionaldirectory.com
Our Toolbar PR now shows as all white, or too low for me to detect any green.
That's normal - toolbar PR is updated seperately to the rest of the G index.
So we may or may not get re-sandboxed. I'll keep you posted and let you know what happens. Did the switch over the other day.
TJ
Beware of Yahoo however, ever since the change we have been out of Yahoo's index.
Do you mean that Yahoo supports 301 better?
I'm thinking of doing the same but my main fear is that Yahoo will not transfer backlinks to the new domain.
I was told that if i set up 301 redirect Google will transfer pr and backlinks to the new domain automatically and i will not need to ask all my linkpartners to change my link.
As for Yahoo - i highly doubt that this is possible. Am i wrong?
Thanks a lot for your opinions!
Actually www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com just as home.domain.com or users.domain.com would be.
Yes, you need to use a 301 redirect from one to the other; usually from non-www to www.
Additionally ask as many external sites that link to the "old" one to update their links.
Google does run a process over their database every few months that attempts to rationalise the data. Search for "URL canonicalisation" in this forum or via Google for more information on this.
Yahoo have problems following a 301 redirect, but their staff have confirmed that they are working on it.
I heard from Yahoo that they hope for a fix "in a month."
The site I describe above, moved six weeks ago, is still ranking in Yahoo on the old domain with the old pages still cached. I can't tell about the home page... as, for whatever reason, they don't cache that page. Maybe they'll fix the problem before the site is reindexed.
