Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As soon as google saw the .301, the site tanked, all rankings and pr wiped.
anyway way to rectify this? SHould they ahve done a meta refresh instead?
I believe your rankings will come back, it's just a question of how long it will take. I had a site that switched domains in May 04 that came back in Google in March 05. I don't know if it will take this long today.
Try to get your backlinks pointing to the old domain changed to point to the new domain.
12 months for a site to recover? That, is not a site recovery, that is a complete new set of rankings.
I am thinking... stuff the 301, I'm going to put the old site up, remove the 301, do a metarefresh and see hwat happens, I can not wait 12 months for a recovery.
We redirected 7 of the combinations to one canonical domain, and Google rerlisted everthing within 6 weeks. It took about 3 or 4 months for the PR to get sorted out too.
I have just done a similar thing in March with another site. It took a few months for the listings to get sorted out (they did get sorted in May, but then Google suddenly reverted to using older data while they sorted out their 301 redirect hijacking mess for a few weeks). Everything was finally correct as of a few weeks ago, and PR has all been updated in the last few days.
It can take a year, but my experience has been 3 or 4 months.
Can you attribute the recovery to something google did, or, did you go on a new link campaign, get old links changed etc.
It can take a year, but my experience has been 3 or 4 months.
Our process of 301s from old to new domains seems to be making VERY slow progress after a traffic meltdown in February. We do see more pages spidered now and the old pages seem to be slowly dropping out. My plan now is to use robots.txt to exclude the old pages from the index to give us cleaner listings.
One thing to eliminate is this possibility:
The 301s did not cause the problems, rather it forced Google to look at the site again and as part of that process Google decided there were problems/link issues/robots.txt configuration issues/etc.
At the conference Google Engineers were very clear - "use 301s" when redirecting or clearing up www vs non www issues.
Does not have a robots.txt file, compeltely white hat SEO. loads of content, and only very relevant links.
The google engineers would have said "do it like this" for googles purposes, not for sites maintaining their rankings.
Site has maintained its rankings on Yahoo, for the new domain.
Site has maintained its rankings on Yahoo, for the new domain.
How about MSN? We noted Google and MSN troubles but Yahoo improvements, and I'm wondering if this is a sign of automated "duplicate content" filter issues for sites that do OK in Yahoo which uses human filtering and therefore is less likely to penalize good sites.
John
They made good progress, but several dozen www pages refused to disappear from the site: search. Making a fake sitemap (listing all the URLs that we wanted Google to drop), and placing that on another site made Google drop the rest in a few weeks.
All was fine for a few weeks, then Google suddenly added back all the pages that had been dropped (I think this was in late May). The cache dates were from last year. It was clear that they intended to respider all those URLs again to see what their status (200 - 301 - 302 - 404) was, as part of their fix for the "302 redirect URL hijacks" that were being talked about all over the forums. The old data remained visible for 3 or 4 weeks and then fixed itself again (apart from one redirected www URL that stayed visible, and one URL for a page that was deleted 18 months or more ago - and those fixed themselves after a further 2 or 3 weeks).
I have written aout this situation 5 or 6 times over the last 3 or 4 months. There is a lot more detail in some of those other postings. The posts will be in "Google Update" threads or threads talking about "redirects" or "302 Hijackings".
