Is Google incorrectly indexing content when 301 redirect is applied?

[JS_Harris]

Just an observation about 301 redirects and how Google is handling them recently.

- Page A redirects to page B after a branding related domain change.
- Google had previously indexed page A, now they index page A and page B
- The content on the new domain is fully indexed, google cache looks good
- The content on the old domain is still fully indexed, google cache is from the new URI (?)
- Traffic is down 80% after the move signalling a problem
- Possibly related: Google's Search Console page/keyword analytics data has not updated since Feb23rd(8+ days ago)

Is something major going on behind the scenes at Google? Is the above normal? There are examples appearing in Google's webmaster forum from confused people that might be impacted by the above, example - [productforums.google.com...]

[edited by: aakk9999 at 1:04 pm (utc) on Mar 3, 2016]
[edit reason] Fixed the link [/edit]

[aakk9999]

Google had previously indexed page A, now they index page A and page B

This would only be normal for the short time - a period where Googlebot has crawled new page A, but it has not yet re-crawled page B and hence it has not seen the redirect. But the caching aspect is new - indicating Google has seen the redirect, but for some reason not followed the directive properly.

[JS_Harris]

The example I gave is one of dozens of confused people posting in Google's webmaster forum about the same thing, that particular one is from redirects made two months ago.

- Old URIs and new URIs all indexed, all sharing the new URI cache, and this is two+ months later ?

[Andy Langton]

The content on the old domain is still fully indexed, google cache is from the new URI (?)

Google do have a "domain-aliasing" thing. If, for instance, you own .com/.net/.org and redirect them all to one place, Google will show the searched URL rather than the actual one. I.e. if .net redirects to .com, if you search for the .net, this is what would display in results. The cache will always show as from the canonical URL, however.

This is just a display thing, and if you search for the actual content, you'll never find the redirecting URL.

[Storiale]

Andy, I was curious about your comment so I checked ours. luckily that didn't happen for me, though they redirected about 2 years ago.. so may have gotten rid of all .net. I was worried that I'd have something else to worry about. ha ha.

[engine]

JS_Harris, I checked a redirect that was done a few months ago and the original url still shows up in the SERPs. When checking the Google cache it shows the new url correctly. So, i'm seeing similar to you, although this is an entirely different domain, on a different host, so there should be little confusion.
This used to be dealt with fairly swiftly in the past, so not sure what's going on. The old urls rank well, and that's not so good as it should be the new site.

[Andy Langton]

luckily that didn't happen for me, though they redirected about 2 years ago.. so may have gotten rid of all .net. I was worried that I'd have something else to worry about. ha ha.

It's just a display thing - nothing to worry about. If I search for site:example.com (which I registered a number of years ago and has redirected to .co.uk from the outset) Google shows me the .com in results - but the link and the cache go to the co.uk. This has been the case for many years. I assume Google did it to increase CTR and to make sure searchers don't think they're going to the "wrong" site.

[aakk9999]

Agree with Andy.

Also, John Mueller said that Google may not always follow 301 directive when it comes to what it shows in SERPs. There is a past discussion here: [webmasterworld.com...]