Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Well, I was getting 900 -1200 unique visitors a day on my old host, and now I get 200 visitors a day. I had around 2,530 "links to my site" a few months ago via Webmaster tools and now I have 37! Ouch! It also appears hundreds of pages were dropped. Webcrawl has no issues to report either.
My entire blog is intact and the link structure was kept the same - I checked my own blog pages with the exact pages indexed in Google, and they worked fine when I first switched over, and then everything just dropped! I don't get it.
The only thing I noticed is that my old host had a "www" in front of my domain, and my new host has a no "www" in front of my site name. I am assuming this is some sort of redirect issue? If so, what is the exact kind of text I would need to put in such file to get my "www" links to my new "non www" URL on the new host?
Sorry for the noob questions and lengthy post. This is just really frustrating. It's only a hobby site but it's still very disheartening to lose all those links over the past few years, and to see traffic way down.
Please elaborate on "does not have". Do you mean that appending www to your domain name fails to bring up the site?
Are you using a host that is reasonably well known, e.g. lots of people recommend it on the web hosting forums? In my limited experience of about a dozen shared hosts, all of them by default treat www and a lack of www the same.
I can't think of a host change affecting backlinks. If the delay is long, you may lose indexed pages and ranks.
If you didn't get a note from Google about your site hosting nasty files, this may have nothing to do with it. Let's see what others think.
Similarly, you might find pages have gone 'supplemental' if there are no longer enough valid links keeping them in the main index.
What I mean by "does not have" is that my previous host automatically had "www" in front of my domain name by default, whereas the new host doesn't do that at all, instead using a default without "www".
Yeah the new host I use is well known and recommended by a a lot. In fact, most of the people migrating from my old host ended up at this new one too.
Shaddows - Thanks for the help. I've been in WMT for quite some time. I will set the "preferred domain" in the settings section in WMT and see what happens.
Thanks guys. This sucks :( I wish my old host never had those recurring security issues.
P.S. What's really weird about this is that right after I moved my blog to the new host, I specifically went back through dozens of indexed pages via searches in google to make sure my link structure was correct, and those pages all went exactly to the site as they were supposed to. Now? All those pages are gone. Hundreds of pages no longer indexed and I moved my site at the beginning of January!
Edit: Shaddows - I did change the preferred URL and now I received this message from Google WMT under the "links" section:
You have specified domain.com as the preferred domain for this site. The information for this domain may not be complete. Please add the site domain.com for more complete information
It's asking me to change my domain to the same exact domain? I don't follow.
[edited by: Boulder90 at 11:23 am (utc) on Jan. 30, 2009]
it must be redirected to www.example.com
if the request is for example.com
or wwww.example.com
or junk.example.com
it must be redirected to www.example.com
# Redirect if NOT example.com (exactly) to example.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
[webmasterworld.com...]
It's always available in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
At this point I'm just curious if my text here looks "right" for my specific application of redirecting my indexed www url's with my new host url that does not use www.
I would get a hold of your host and switch it so that the default is www.
The reason being is that from the sounds of it, the VAST majority of your inbound links point to the www version of your site, so that is the version you are best off using.
Once you have your host does that, then setup the redirect so that requests must have the www in front or they get redirected to the www version.
You could do it the other way around, but you'd be redirecting the more highly linked version of your domain to the less linked version which isn't necessarily the best option.
[edited by: Philosopher at 10:54 pm (utc) on Jan. 30, 2009]
Erku - I keep a small log of how many links I have for a given site every few months, as well as indexed URL's. It's just some simple text in notepad. I can then compare that with current numbers available on WMT.
10:07:26 PM) TECH: We can't actually control this.
(10:07:34 PM) Boulder: why not?
(10:08:33 PM) TECH: I mean, we can't force what google does.
The tech then tells me to hold on, and I wait 10 minutes for his response. He redirects me to the Cpanel and tells me to do a 301 redirect in the admin options area, which I'm not sure is the same thing that Philosopher talked about(in fact I'm pretty sure it's not)
Am I wrong or is the tech support wrong?
Yes you can. It's all in how you set up the site.
*** (10:08:33 PM) TECH: I mean, we can't force what google does. ***
Yes you can. That's what the site-wide non-www to www 301 redirect does.
I hate hosts that are this clueless. It looks like it might already be time for you to move hosts again.
If you have a long history of having at site at www with non-www redirecting, you need to get back to that exact same situation as soon as possible.
