Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Here is my experience with a recent 301 redirect:
--Popular travel niche website approx 4 years old.
--Actively covering all topics related to my niche but we also sell entire vacations… think of this site as being a vortal covering everything and anything dealing with this niche including up-to-date news, weather, unique articles, forums, interactive tools for planning a vacation and a bunch more all of which are free.
--Very little link trading with the bulk of links coming in naturally
--Very little outbound linking
--Clean HTML (for the most part)
--Some JavaScript but nothing black hat or meant for SEO
--Listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, Zeal and Google Directory
--Was a PR 4 with about 50 inbound links
--Index count was 6,080
--Was in the top 10 results pretty solid even through Bourbon and other various updates
The 301 bomb (website suicide), applied a domain wide 301 redirect via IIS to a domain that is 18 months old. E.G. olddomain.com/widgets --> newdomain.com/widgets
I have seen some people post “why would you do this?” … this isn’t a valid question in my opinion because there are lots of very good reasons to do so.
--301 was put in place roughly 80 days ago
--After approx 5 days the site was nowhere to be found in the SERP’s
--Sent a request to help@ and was told the site was not banned or penalized
--Started the long waiting process
--Quasay non existent update Gilligan started
--Old domain was stripped of PR across all DC’s
--New domain still has no PR on any DC’s
--BL’s update to 138 on most DC’s
--Google Directory updated showing the new domain as a PR 6 and at the top of my niche
--site:oldsite.com would reveal the new domain
--index count is fluxing between 10,300 and 10,900
--PR begins to return to the old domain!
--alas, no where in the SERP’s even after going 50 pages deep.
Sounds like classic sandbox in my opinion but I think a better name would be “Gilligan’s Island” because most of us in 301 club feel stranded on a deserted island with no hope of rescue but occasionally there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
I also want to point out that until you have been through an experience like this it’s not helping anyone to call people in this situation whiners, or something inflammatory because we are simply trying to figure out how to make a some what smooth transition and to avoid the sandbox.
Well, if you are still reading you are probably in this position now but if you are thinking about doing a 301 redirect, do so understanding that you will loss rank for at least several weeks.
Here some alternatives that have been discussed
1)Meta refresh to new domain – bad, could get a dupe content filter
2)JavaScript redirect – bad, looks too black hat or spammy
3)302 redirect – is not permanent and is also very spammy looking
4)404 all old pages – don’t know how this would work
5)Build a new site which simply wasn’t an option for me because I have a lot of unique content that would take weeks to regenerate without having any duplication
Another way to look at this was put best by jd01
It appears...
New Domain with 301 from old site = New Site
New Domain with no redirect from old site = New Site
New Domain with meta refresh from old site = New Site
New Domain and old domain with old content = New Site & Dup Content
IOW New Domain = New Site
Don't change if you don't have to - the, for lack of a better term, sandbox is in play.
Justin
Being that GoogleGuy is the closest thing we have to a direct contact (for most of us anyway) I would greatly appreciate his feedback.
That worked, after a few weeks the listings merged and the traffic came back.
We have just had our hosting upgraded by our hosting company which involved moving our site to another server (and IP). They forgot to set the default priority on default.asp, and Google was doing a crawl just at the time of the changeover (it's also co-incided with the wierd update thing that's going on at the moment). I now have both duplicate listings back, and traffic has dropped again. I have written to Google advising them of the update to our site, and the 301 is back up again. They have just done a 2 day long crawl of our site again, but no traffic back as yet, too early to tell though.
One shows..."more results from" and the other with the
trailing / does not. Could this be a possible reason
our site's main page is not being indexed now in G?
When we type www.mysite.com into the address window in
our browser it always forwards to www.mysite.com/.
Now I'm wondering if this htaccess file I edited to
restrict non www pages and dynamic pages is causing my index page to be dropped from G.
This just gets more and more confusing each day.
any ideas why just our main page, index.htm is missing
from the Serps?
Thanks
If you forget the trailing / then your link to www.domain.com/folder will first be redirected to domain.com/folder/ {without www!} before arriving at the required www.domain.com/folder/ page.
The intermediate step, at domain.com/folder/ will kill your listings. Lucklily, this effect is very easy to see if you use Xenu LinkSleuth to check your site: it shows up as reporting double the number of pages (when you generate the sitemap) that you actually have, with half of the pages having a title of "301 Moved".
Chris, best advice, stay away from 301's in any way shape or form, 404 the old pages,
I don't think I agree with this at all modemmike. I know of one case where the 301s worked perfectly for a site when they did a massive restructuring. The 301s carried their PR forward as Google had implied it would.
I agree with you and others that 301s *sometimes* cause problems or are not handled properly by search engines, but I think they are still the best way to go based on comments by many posters and search engineers from Google, Yahoo, and ASK at the WebmasterWorld conference.
I don't think I agree with this at all modemmike.
I have also heard some say they work perfectly as well, so I would agree then that it's a gamble, luck of the draw.
I never had internal links to non-www, but a few incoming links were like that.
I went ahead and did a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file, after some
very helpful advice from people on these forums.
If anything, my SERPs positions improved after that, but its impossible to tell
if that was due to other causes or not. -Larry
Our experiences are consistent with the idea that 301s don't help after 302 problems - we are still in the Google dump after many months of 301s.
However, I trust the Google engineers talking at WebmasterWorld and SES who made it VERY clear that 301s are the way to go to avoid canonical confusion, 302 problems, and redirection problems.
The old domain was PR 5, this new one is PR 0 still.
I haven't bothered to get many links to point to the new URL.
I have not gathered more incoming links to the .com.au, and few existing link partners have bothered to change their link to the new domain.
I must assume, that though the sandbox was applied to the new domain, that google is now filtering in over time, links from the old site to the new.
Former rnakings not achieved, but rankings are on the improve, and on a daily basis at the moment.
How so, I mean what are your indications that rankings are on the move? Just wondering if you have been released from the sandbox or if you are in a low demand sector... how many results are returned when you find your listing?
Not enogh that those former hijacked/302 links, sites had no influence on what happen to the sites, but that its alos not possible to just make a simple 301 and google still cant fix the problem.
Also notice how much writing there has been lately (1 years time) about 301, 302, hijacking, omitted results, supplemental resuls, bla bla, thats not just bulltalk, here are many experience webmasters here and trust me this must be a HUGE problem for google or they would have fixed it or if they fix it somethng els will be messed up.
I'm cautiously optimistic at this point.
more obscure terms that I monitor
Are these terms on new pages by chance?
[somesite.net...]
[anothersite.net...]
[yetanothersite.net...]
There are hundreds of different sites!
When I visit these sites there is nothing about my site or url anywhere on the page or in the source code?
Why would I be getting referrals from these websites in my stats? Are they cloaking google and using my pages somehow?
Sticky me if you want to see the real urls. I can't figure this one out?
Amazingly enough, I checked and all these sites are indexed by google yet my site is banned? Most of the websites have the exact same content and design. The only difference is the domain name.
Just ran another check on some phrases I track related to blogs posts (my site has a blog and an RSS feed). Those phrases are now starting to appear in Google SERPs as well. This makes me wonder if the new blog search isn't somehow helping to pull my site out of the sandbox.
2 million Pages in google search criteria. No.1 ranked site is a pr6 with 150 incoming links.(Prior to this my site was pr5 with 110 incoming links, but was set up better than the No. site for seo)
I have software that I run daily that checks position on all search engines, data centres of google for particular keywords. Jumped 200 places at the start of the week, and another 20 places over the enxt week.
Not amazing results, from 400+ to 175 but a definite improvement.
errorsamac, we just did exactly what you're speaking of to a php site 2 days ago. (We made the inside pages url friendly)The index page stayed the same.So now all 160 of the internal pages 404. A scary situation, but we figured better to do it now than later. So our stats were mainly 404's yesterday, yet the visitors click thru the custom 404 anyway. So we didn't lose visitors.
It should be interesting how G responds to this. Last year in November we did a script change that changed all the inside URL's and we lost all the inside PR, but G picked up on it within 2 weeks. So we are curious as how big G will handle it this year. I'll let you know.
So, this evening the new URL's are starting to appear in the Google serps, with a cache date of Sept 25, and the 404's are few in our stats, mostly from Yahoo and MSN. So it only took 5 days, from the 19th to the 26th for G to find our new URLS. The site has a PR 4. We feel like the new urls have been included in one database so far, and will be fed into the other databases.
We didn't use any 301's or redirects.
Wow, what an expirement! Congrads on a smooth transtition and please keep me posted... long term on this will indeed be interesting to follow.
Redirect done 4 days back.
All non-www cached pages turn URL only today, incuding the homepage.
No noticeable changes in rankings - but a fw obscure phrases have started appearing in logs from one datacenter.
Will keep you posted.
This morning, our stats from G show ALL NEW URLS! No 404's or old url pages. We also saw in the stats last night that Yahoo found some new urls.
So, anyone wanting to make their inside urls search engine friendly, but not change your domain or index page, it is safe to do so. Just make a custom 404 that redirects to the homepage, make sure all your internal links are correct, and let the old url pages 404.
The new URLS passed to all the Google databases in 6 days, including the international databases. Cool
One interesting thing to note, is that in the transition from Google dropping the old urls to adding the new. In our stats was the new url, but when you clicked on it, the page found by the searcher was the 404 page. In otherwords, all the old urls got wiped out and every page was found with the 404. Google had spidered the 404 and was serving that page only for 1 day for all urls.
It looked kind of freaky, and we were wondering if Google would straighten it out, and today all the urls are fine and the transition went smooth.
So now... we wait on the next PR update.
Our experience with 301's have been this:
nonwww to www - were successful
internal folder to a new subdomain - were successful
subdomain to a new domain = sandbox
We don't have experience redirecting an old domain to a new domain, sorry
[edited by: Sweet_Cognac at 12:24 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2005]
How would you guys suggest we deal with redirecting the old listings we've got in the search engines?
At first i was thinking redirects, but now I think it would be better to just let Google recrawl and reindex the new pages, and place a custom 404 for all the old pages.
Any thoughts?
The site went online 4 weeks ago at which time I set up a 301 redirect for all old asp to html pages and non-www to www. After two weeks all new .html pages are listed in site command with new description and title and all old pages with .asp have supplemental results--this is the same after 4 weeks. The home page went up to PR 1 but all others still PR 0 and I don't expect this to change till next PR update.
The keyword ranking is on 1st page of results for any keyword phrases involving business name and city but not for any other keywords but this may be due to the site still less than 1 year old, i.e., sandbox. At least Google got the 301 redirects correct.
I took the custom 404 out of my .htaccess, but things have been very bumpy with that site (for whatever reasons) for a year now.
