Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We want all the pages indexed under site1. No one seems to know what the answer to this is.
[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 3:04 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2009]
[edit reason] No personal URLs, please, see charter [/edit]
If you have access to server logs for the old domain, then you can verify that Google is just not visiting the pages, rather than not implementing the redirect. Also, non-existent pages can hang around even when changes have been factored in - I know of pages removed several years ago that are still retrievable in the Google index.
You can speed up the process by linking to the old pages, or perhaps by submitting a sitemap of the old pages to Google (I'm not the guy to ask about sitemaps though).
The bottom line, though, is that if Google does not think a page is important enough to revisit, it likely has no performance worth mentioning and so is not causing any problems.
One thing to remember is that the presence of the old URLs is not preventing spidering of the new ones - they are spidered on their own merit (although if there are links to the old location, they should be counted towards the new URL).
Our site- site1 DOT com - was redirected to site2 DOT com earlier in 2008.
Ah, a common thread starter. Here comes the killer...
A few months later, due to a variety of circumstances, we had to redirect back, from site2 back to site1.
Big site? Only a few months between the first redirect and second? Yuck! I would imagine Google is still trying to determine your original intentions.
At the same time, much has changed over the past 12 months from an indexing perspective. If you don't have any equity to pass through the site, especially one with 600,000 pages, they will be relegated to what was once called the Supplemental Index and it appears that is what happened in your case. They are not getting enough juice for a proper reindexing and just sitting there in limbo.
Its now been six months since the redirect (and its subsequent reversal); however site2 continues to have a huge index in Google- over 600,000 pages, while site1 shows only 100,000. We thought time would resolve this and Google would process the redirect, but it hasn't.
I don't think there has been enough time that has elapsed. I'd give it another six months. That is a lot of pages to recalculate and again, if you didn't have the equity to float that kind of change, you pretty much shot yourself in the foot as they say. :(
We have a 301 redirect from site2 to site1, and even redirect at the page level of site2 to individual pages on site1.
Are you absolutely, positively, certain that everything is in order with the redirects? There is no duplication happening? You don't have any canonical issues?
We want all the pages indexed under site1. No one seems to know what the answer to this is.
You could always use the Google URI removal tool and get that Site 2 out of the index. But, that is 600,000 pages as you say and I'd be reluctant to give that up at this point.
It sure sounds like there was insult to injury added with the redirect back, that is where your challenges were multiplied by who knows what factor. So much has changed in 12 months that there are all sorts of things at play here. And, 600,000 pages is a bit to work with. ;)
