Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A quick site: search shows that my other pages are listed only once, under EITHER the old or new domain, but the homepage is listed under both.
Is it normal for Google to have both pages listed after a 301? The content on the homepage is always changing so the new page is listed with a different description from the old one, but is there still a risk of a duplicate content penalty here?
You're fortunate, many people (me too), experienced the ban of both domains. So be careful, we haven't solved yet the problem of how to change domain without being penalized by Google (all the other SE works correcly).
See that thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
One way to to get an idea of when they crawled your pages last is when you do the site command, or whatever checks you were doing, click on the cache link for each of your pages and see what date Google says it was crawled last.
One other issue you face too, when moving to a new domain name, is you lose your seniority in Google.
As far as Google is concerned, the new example.com site you setup is fresh meat and untested, unknown, with no toher links pointing to it.
It's like your credit score, the longer you have your oldest credit card open, and hence established a long credit history, the higher your credit score will be for a loan, and the lower APR you will get.
If you close out your oldest credit card, there goes your length of credit history, and your credit score drops back down some.
This works the same way with Google. I cannot imagine why anyone would change a domain name that was well indexed before, as you are starting over again.
[edited by: JeffOstroff at 7:39 pm (utc) on July 12, 2006]
As it happens, the new domain is not completely new - I acquired it when the previous owner let it expire and it dropped from the registry. It already had a few links to it, so I'm not starting from scratch. I'm also hoping that the old domain's ranking will contribute to the new one's if and when G fully works out the 301.
As it turns out the new domain already ranks at no. 1 for some of my main search terms, which the old one never did, so, so far it looks to have been a good decision to move. (I have added content too which probably helps)
It has taken about 2 weeks for G to list all my pages under the new domain. Now only obsolete URLs are listed (as supplemental) in site:old-domain.com
The domain change has been as smooth as I could have hoped (Yahoo had it sorted within a couple of days) and my rank in both Google and Yahoo has improved since the change, so a pretty successful exercise all in all.
