Redirection to new site - 5 months after

[smallcompany]

I redirected two sites to a new one as products from the first two were retired.
This happened back in early November 2014. I did 301 via .htaccess like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/

Robots.txt stayed there as it was, including the sitemap line.

As of today, 301 redirects are showing in WMT for the new site as backlinks from old sites.

When I query Google for old sites, all comes as indexed, titles and descriptions from the new site. If I just type old site name in Google (like example for example.com) some pages show up.

I did "site move" in WMT, and it still is not allowing me to i.e. select preferred domain (with or without WWW). It says "Not all options are available because of a Change of Address request related to this site"

1. What could be wrong here? Is actually anything wrong?
2. Should I put robots.txt to disallow all for old sites?
3. Is it normal for redirected sites to show up in SERPS 5 months after 301 implementation?

Thanks

[rish3]

Is it normal for redirected sites to show up in SERPS 5 months after 301 implementation?

It didn't used to be, but it is now, and I don't know why.

At some point, Google decided it was okay, when a site owner did a 301 + site move, to continue holding on to urls from the old site.

In my case, I have a site that's been 301 redirected, and "site moved within GWT" for more than a year. The new site pages rank well, and they are the ones that show for queries that don't have the old site brand in them. However, if you specifically search for "site:oldsite.tld", it shows the old urls...lots of them.

Why Google thinks that's useful, I don't know. "Permanent" is pretty clear to me. The language in RFC2616 around 301 redirects is also pretty clear: "The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs"

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:29 am (utc) on Apr 11, 2015]
[edit reason] fixed unintended smiley display [/edit]

[adder]

1. if you google for site:oldexample.com, serps will show results that appear to be from oldexample.com but when you click on the results, you get to newexample.com. There's nothing unusual here.
2. This puzzles me a bit. Surely, if you go to oldexample.com/robots.txt, you are not served that file (server response 200), right? Coz if you are, then the redirect is not working properly. So I don't understand what you mean by "Robots.txt stayed there"
The old sites no longer exist, so the robots files don't exist either?
If you put oldexample.com/robots.txt in the address bar, you should see newexample.com/robots.txt

As for the "site move", it may take some time. How long ago did you do the "site move"?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:21 am (utc) on Apr 11, 2015]
[edit reason] fixed unintended smiley display [/edit]

[rish3]

1. if you google for site:oldexample.com, serps will show results that appear to be from oldexample.com but when you click on the results, you get to newexample.com. There's nothing unusual here.

That's new though. It did not used to work that way.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:30 am (utc) on Apr 11, 2015]
[edit reason] fixed unintended smiley display [/edit]

[smallcompany]

I wanted to post an update.

I noticed that if I created a redirect in .htaccess like this:

RewriteRule ^subfolder/ http://www.example.com/different-subfolder/ [R=301,L,NC]

pages that were linked from the original subfolder index page would show up in GWT as links from old site linking to a new pages.

Redirects for those pages (linked to from the subfolder index) were already in place.

As I fix such redirects, the number of links goes down.

[not2easy]

You should never mix mod_alias with mod_rewrite. Chaos happens.
This is a mod_alias Redirect even though it begins as a mod_rewrite Rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/

Visit the Apache Forum here: [webmasterworld.com...] for help with straightening it out or you can go and read how/why here: [webmasterworld.com...]