301's, DNS, hosting and domain name changes

Well Done Google

[hurlimann]

As these areas are ones Google have been thought to be slow on in the past I can report that:
1) A 301 was handled 100% correctly at first update. Domain name was changed, Pagerank transfered and serp position static for all pages.
2) A dns and IP change to 20 sites was spotted by Google and all have or are now being crawled. Maybe a fluke but they all appear to be getting the deep crawl treatment.

No other engine has come close. Well Done.

[Brett_Tabke]

You are one of the few that reported Google handling it that way on 301. Usually, page rank is zapped and you start over.

>No other engine comes close

I'd disagree with that. There are two other engines who handle moved sites better. It's been my experience, that there is no quicker way to mess up a ranking, than to move a site (extensive experience in doing that).

[rjohara]

I recently got a new page listed in dmoz, and the editor put it in with no file extension, i.e., instead of mysite.org/sequence.html it was listed as mysite.org/sequence. This doesn't cause browsing problems - the server seems to know enough to look for the .html version - but when the page appeared in the last Google directory it was at the bottom of the list with no PR bar showing. I presume this happened because of the file extension problem.

I know next to nothing about servers, but I have learned enough to make a simple .htaccess file with a few redirect lines in it, no more. For this problem I put in (roughly):

Redirect 301 /sequence http:/ /mysite.org/sequence.html

Was that the correct thing to do? Or should I be indicating that "sequence" is in fact "sequence.html" by some other means?

I'd like to be able someday to implement Berners-Lee's recommendation (in "Good URL's Don't Change") to drop the file extensions altogether, but I'm not conversant enough with servers and how they interact with Google et al. to be up to that task yet.

RJO

[Lisa]

Why not make a mysite.org/sequence/ directory. That would solve redirect problems.

[rjohara]

Thank you, Lisa - I did consider doing that, but I've got a lot of internal links already written and pointing to "sequence.html" so I thought it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Maybe it would be better to replace all those sequence.html's with sequence/ and put the file in a directory of its own, as you say.

When I first learned HTML I designed all my sites with a paired file/directory structure (topic1.html and topic1/, topic2.html and topic2/, etc.). The server I had didn't handle trailing slashes easily, and I didn't appreciate the convenience of putting an index file inside each directory. So I've got a lot of legacy pages and directories organized that way. I'm gradually trying to migrate them to a simpler structure so the file extensions won't be so conspicuous. I'm not sure if I'm doing it efficiently, though. The next Google update will tell me if I've done the first batch right (lots of .html's should disappear and be replaced with dir/'s).

RJO

[hurlimann]

>You are one of the few that reported Google handling it that way on 301. Usually, page rank is zapped and you start over.

I know and I was suprided too.

Brett which other engines handle moved sites better? So far none have done anything:(

And yes I agree that a move is a last resort, It was forced on us when we lost a domain name case.

[Brett_Tabke]

>better

Fast/Ink. Both follow the 301 and don't mess with the ranking if the content is the same.

[hurlimann]

Just my luck Brett. Neither has worked.
Ink (PFI) keep rejecting the new url as duplicate content even though the old url is gone and Fast keep listing the old url despite crawling the new one.