302, 301, 30gone.

The best way out?

[DerekH]

Hello
One of my ISPs has always set up his virtual servers so that example.com was redirected to www.example.com using a 302

My 600-page website was 99.9% indexed no problems.

3 weeks ago, he turned this off, for reasons he's not able to make all that clear.

My site shrank back to 180 indexed pages for www.example.com, plus another 100 for different pages from example.com, which are
a) supplemental
b) from about 18 months ago.
The other 320 pages aren't in the index AT ALL!

Recognising that the old 302 probably wasn't as good as a 301, I put my own 301 on every page.

Since then, one (mercifully important) example.com page has reappeared with the www on the front and is right up to date.
But the other 420 screwed-up pages are still supplemental or gone forever.

Any ideas on whether
a) this will eventually now heal up
b) there's a way to speed it up.

Thanks for your thoughts!
DerekH

[g1smd]

With the 301 redirect in place, clicking one of those non-www "Supplemental Results" pages in the SERPs will get the visitor to the right place on your site.

It is a concern if you now have very few www pages indexed. Keep checking. If things are working like they used to, then you should see the number of those indexed www pages increase, and take not much more than a month to fix.

You must make sure that every page of the site has a unique title and a unique meta description, and each one reflects exactly what is on that page. This step is absolutley vital.

Run Xenu LinkSleuth over your site and make sure that you have no navigation problems at all.

The non-www "Supplemental Results" will take at least several years to drop out. They are not a concern, because anyone clicking on them will still reach your site.

[DerekH]

Thanks g1smd
There are at least a few things in your list to keep me busy while I wait :-)
DerekH

[g1smd]

Make sure too, that every page of the site links back to the home page, and that the URL of that link is either "/" or "www.domain.com/", and does NOT mention the index file filename iteself.

[DerekH]

That's not so easy - I use Dreamweaver, and it insists on my pointing to a file, rather than a folder, if I'm to use it to check for broken links.

How do others get round this nuisance?
DerekH

[g1smd]

If Google indexes your homepage as www.domain.com/ (and that is usually what it prefers to do) and all your links (and therefore PR) flow to /index.html then you have a big problem on your hands.