Redirect Permanent to New Domain

Moving to a new domain

[Psycho111]

I stumbled upon an old webmasterworld forum post about redirecting a whole site to a new domain by doing the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) [newdomain.tld...] [R=301,QSA,L]
This will redirect all to the equivalent on the new domain, providing you keep the same directory structure.
The R=301 flag will ensure that the moved permanently header is returned to the caller, and the QSA (Query String Append) flag will rewrite your URI and append the original QUERY_STRING once rewritten.

When I use the simspider over at search engine world it's getting a 200 status when I have it visit my old domain that's being redirected to the new domain. It shows the new domain content for "Spider Text" but it keeps the "Spider URL" as the old domain. I used the server header checker and I get a 301 redirect when accessing my old domain though.

Inktomi has already picked up my new site.....but it didn't update the URL. The title of all my pages are the name of the new domain...but the URL it's listed under is for the old domain.

Can someone please explain why the above 301 redirect is not working for the spiders?

[Psycho111]

I just noticed I dissapeared from Google today......my old domain doesn't come up for any searches...even very popular searches that I dominated before. My old domain still has the same # of pages in the index though...600. My new domain has 20 pages indexed and it doesn't come up for any searches either....except for searches for the title of my old domain.

This could be normal, but wouldn't my old domain start dissapearing completely from the index when it starts picking up my new domain?

[jdMorgan]

Psycho111,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

Inktomi is very slow about updating URLs. The last time I removed a few pages, it took Ink a year to stop asking for them, despite the 404-Not Found and 410-Gone responses. Keep your 301 redirects in place, and Ink will eventually figure it out.

Google is usually a lot faster, but unpredictable. The timing of picking up new URLs versus dropping old ones seems random. Make sure you have at least a few incoming links to the new domain -- that will help it get indexed faster. The process of 'resolving' the 301'ed URLs, their incoming links, and their Page Rank to the new URLs seems to take anywhere from a few weeks to two months. Well, that used to be true, but now that Google seems to have no fixed spidering schedule, it may vary even more.

Put priority on getting some incoming links to the new domain, and then you'll just have to be patient and wait for the search engines to catch up. Now might be a good time for a short vacation...

Jim

[Psycho111]

I'm still no where to be found on Google...I used to dominate popular searches but now nothing. My new domain is indexed in Google(over 200 pages)....but it doesn't show up for any searches, except for when I search for the title of my old domain...weird. Even when I search for the title of my new domain I'm down in the results....very frustrating.

[Psycho111]

I'm considering deleting the permanent redirect because it really isn't helping. If Google receives 404s for the old domain it will probably launch my new domain up to the top of the search results...I guess it's thinking I have duplicate content but it shouldn't since it should receive a 301 visiting any page of my old domain.

[jdMorgan]

You're right, a 301 TELLS them you've moved and the content is not duplicate, because they can't even get to the old content any more.

This sounds like they just have not yet credited your old back-links to your new URL. I think they have slowed down the backlink analysis/updates recently.

Make sure you get some of your good backlinks updated to point to the new domain. That should help.

Jim

[Psycho111]

What makes it stranger is the fact that the Google toolbar is giving my new domain a PR of 4 and my old domain was a PR4......but I'm not showing up in the search results.