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.
from a usabilty standpoint thats a bad idea.
you should have a custom 404 page that says "this page could not be found" and offers a site map or search feature.
Taken from Googles info for webmasters.
This is what we are going to do when we launch our new site. This will allow the visitors to navigate to the page they were looking for, and will allow Google to drop the old pages and reindex the new ones.
<%
Response.Status="404 Page Not Found"
%>BTW, to redirect properly in asp use:
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.widgets.com/"
%>Don't rely on response.redirect as it return a 302...
Matt-err-GoogleGuy once said that 301s from non-www to www or vice versa is recommended so we'll go with that.
further research shows that google penalizes duplicate content. we have another domain name which is framing our main domain and thought this might be the culprit. so we created a totally different page for this alt domain. still nothing!
Then I read about 301 redirect today and realized that I had done this just around the time of our banishment! I did a redirect from mysite.com to www.mysite.com
big mistake!
I have removed the redirect now.
Hopefully this fixes the proble, we already did a lot of experimenting to get back in google's good graces.. like changing content, layout etc... we also applied to google sitemaps and reapplied to google..
now, I jus hav to keep my fingers crossed.
soned, sorry to say but I think the damage is done, 301 is permanent so you will jsut have to wait it out... being that you only did the non-www you should not have to wait very long, but this is only an guess.
There is definately a 301 bug. I 301'd all of my websites I built from non www to www and they are all gone from google.that is 14 websites gone. You definately don't want to 301 your sites right now.
eyezshine i can second that.
exactly same symptom, 301'd, all gone from google.
>> big mistake! <<
I have only seen good come from it; and it is the recommended action. Your 301 redirect must have exposed some other problem in the server configuration. Run Xenu LinkSleuth to see if that gives any clues at all.
Run Xenu LinkSleuth to see if that gives any clues at all.
This is good advice for anyone actually, this tool is awesome, I found links that I had forgotten existed like the the homepage button in my forums! Amazing what peole will put in for homepages and LinkSleuth exposed this to me as well as a few affiliate programs that were dead. This tool also revealed a few relative links that I was able to correct to absolute links.
This is an update on my earlier post after I changed all .asp file names to .html and set up a 301 redirect to the new file names.
It is only 1 month since the redesign and I'm seeing quite a bit of change.
Keywords that were not ranking anywhere before the design have steadily climbed in the SERPS.
Out of 19 Keywords I'm tracking 7 are on 1st page of results, 4 are within first 4 pages and the rest are steadily gaining in rank every week.
PR went up one notch since the redesign and I expect it to go higher after the next update as we've been gathering links also.
Make sure the links include the full URL, in the right format.
Put the sitemap that refers to the content of DomainA on some other site.
Okay, now my confusion is contagious! I guess I wasn't explaining correctly, domainA.com and domainB.com are the same hence the 301 redirect which is why I was wondering if Google would examined the sitemap from the domainA.com (the old domain name) and saw that all the links are to domainB.com (the new domain name) it would expedite the removal of the old URL's (not likely but thought I would ask). Gbot has been visting me everyday with a fresh cache on the new domain (everyday) and a search for the old domain shows mostly results from the new domain but ther are still thousands of pages indexed from the old domain which I believe is causing a dupe content issue. The removal tool doesn't appear to offer any long term help so I was thinking outside the box. The new domain has a sitemap already setup and is getting downloaded once a day... just thought that maybe I could kind of stear Google a little more with a sitemap from the old domain as well.
I did a 301 redirect from non-www to www 10 days back approx; and I can see that my non-wwws (as supplemental with cache, and url only) have partly disappeared from those two datacenters.
Not that its making any difference to my traffic though :-)
Then Google must have cleaned out their supplimental index because my sites are simply gone with the wind.
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".
... but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so.
on Sep. 27, 2005 I posted this:
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
I have one site that is totally messed up.
Here's what I did.
I had a www.olddomain.com/old folder/
I decided to make a subdomain
... oldfolder.olddomain.com
I did a 301 redirect from www.olddomain.com/old folder/
to: oldfolder.olddomain.com
Then I found the perfect domain name for the "old folder." So I moved all the content from "oldfolder subdomain," rewrote it, added content, and uploaded it to the newdomain.com
I then tried to 301 redirect it from the former oldfolder.olddomain without success, (because I already 301'd the oldfolder to the subdomain,) so I totally deleted "oldfolder.olddomain.com," and "newdomain.com" is in the sandbox bigtime.
Now I was just checking Yahoo by the stats of newdomain.com, and found both "oldfolder.mydomain.com"; "www.mydomain.com/old folder/" and... "newdomain.com"
and... the 404 error page for olddomain.com, but ... the pages in Yahoo for "oldfolder.olddomain.com" are linked to individual pages on olddomain.com.
What a mess, and it's no wonder both sites are "not to be found in Google." So here's what I'm going to do, (since Yahoo is still carrying the old pages, and everyone is still linking to "www.olddomain.com/oldfolder") I'm just going to upload it back to the oldfolder... forget this ever happened... and hopefully so will Google? Or are these 2 sites hopelessly lost for dup content issues?
So after a year of deletion, the backlinks to /oldfolder were still there. So, we shall see. I'll report back in a week and let you know whether any of the major search engines respidered them. Thanks SC
Several long exisiting domains with 301 redirects from the non-www URLs to the www URLs (redirects have been in place for about 2 years).
Backlink checks for www and non-www URL used to always show the same number.
Now a [link:example.com] for all of them show zero (0)backlinks.
They are all hosted on IIS servers and the 301 redirects are to http://www.example.com and not to http://www.example.com/
Any insight into this?
