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Google and 301 Redirects

Now it lists both URLs?

         

MrRoy

10:31 am on Jul 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi,

Previously we had got a listing of [domain.com...] in Google. That page was not ranking well. On further investigations we happen to find out that most of the backward links were pointing towards [domain.com...]

To encounter the problem we implemented a 301 permanent redirect of our [domain.com...] to [domain.com...]

Google had now listed both the pages i.e.
1> [domain.com...]
2> [domain.com...]

Still the now www version is showing the category listings.

I am very confused about the present situation, so your response will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

ciml

6:56 pm on Jul 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Quite a few people have indicated problems with Google's treatment of 301 redirects recently.

Hopefully it's just an artifact of Google's recent index variations (in which case you might stabilise with just one listing), and not a real change in 301 treatment.

LakeDaemon

1:46 am on Jul 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hmm... I have redirected (with 301, of course) from www.mydomain.ru to mydomain.ru at 14 March -- and two weeks ago the site has completely disappeared from google's search results. Nevertheless PR (GoogleBar 2.0) is 5, the site was (and is, of course) listed in dmoz.org and directory.google.com as mydomain.com... But pages reindexing previously quite often are not even visited by GoogleBot from March. It retrieves only robots.txt...
So I don't think that it is an artifact.

And I don't know what to do. :(

mcavic

3:37 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Since last Friday, Google has removed 12 of my pages that had 301 redirects, so it is handling them.

So, MrRoy, Google should find and remove the non-www version eventually. LakeDaemon, as long as you have inbound links, Google should find and pick it up again.

LakeDaemon

9:22 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



mcavic, of course, Google should. But Google retrieves only robots.txt twice a day during five(!) months, regardless of the fact that:
1. There were about 2000 pages known to Google
2. The quantity of inbound links increases permanently.

pixel_juice

9:30 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I've seen this too on a number of domains - even those where 301s had been setup and working successfully prior to Dominic.

Something definitely changed with regards Google's handling of 'mirror'/identical sites and those using 301s. I have also seen some negative effects of Google's mishandling of sites by listing both www and non-www urls. (I've also seen both appear in the serps too, dependent on the query).

LakeDaemon

10:08 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



pixel_juice, sorry, what is Dominic?

pageoneresults

10:13 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



LakeDaemon, you said...

But Google retrieves only robots.txt twice a day during five(!) months.

I'd guess that you have a possible penality attached to your site. What you describe above is a common indicator that there may be a penalty.

And then again, it could be a misconfigured robots.txt file. I'll assume that you've validated the robots text file and that you don't have any directives in there that would be chasing Googlebot away.

P.S. I'll never forget one review I've done this past year where the member could not figure out why their site was not getting indexed by Googlebot. After reviewing the stats, I realized that they had this in their robots.txt file...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

LakeDaemon

10:29 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



robots.txt was -- and is -- correct (except of string "User-agent" that was "User-Agent", but Google understands it).
I even have mailed to Google and they answered (really answered, not replied with standard message) that site was not banned.
The only possible reason for any penalty is that my site is accessible by 2 other old domain names (also through 301). But penalize for it is completely absurd, AFAIK

mcavic

11:04 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The only possible reason for any penalty is that my site is accessible by 2 other old domain names (also through 301). But penalize for it is completely absurd, AFAIK

Yeah, I'm sure they just ignore one of the domains.

pixel_juice

11:08 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>>what is Dominic?

Sorry, it's webmasterworld-speak :)

Dominic was a recent Google update which shook things up a great deal. Lots of things changed, not least Google's update cycle. There were literally hundreds of posts on the site about it. One of the useful ones was this summary [webmasterworld.com].

I didn't notice any problems with 301s until after that update.

LakeDaemon

11:27 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



mcavic: when (aabout a 18 months ago) I have redirected from one domain name to another (new), Google "understood" it correctly, and my site appeared in serp with a new domain name.

pixel_juice: thanks a lot :)

LakeDaemon

3:54 am on Jul 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



what is interesting: occasionally I have found today a page (up-to-date page!) from my site in results. But the URL of this page is 'redirecting' one, not the url to which redirect leads. Any comments will be appreciated.

Kratzy

5:38 am on Jul 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm experiencing similar issues.

Google is not handling 301 redirects the way it should..

I have a website which was at url domain.tld which I have placed a 301 redirect in for, which redirects to domain2.tld and so far google hasn't followed and indexed any of the redirected pages, and its been over a month..

It is however incorrectly indexing sites which are redirected to my site as a meta refresh or 301 redirect in some cases, ie it shows the incorrect url and the current content.

there is definately an issue with Googles handling of redirections.

ThatAdamGuy

2:08 am on Jul 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



AH HA! This explains a lot!

I was trying to figure out why one of my previously PR4'd sections became white-barred, and it's likely due to the fact that I added a rewrite thingy to my .htaccess to move all mysite.com to www.mysite.com to maintain consistency.

And, understandably, subdirectory.mysite.com was not affected because it never had a www in front.

I do wish google treated www.anysite.com always the same as anysite.com. Are there any reasons governing why it doesn't?

mcavic

2:30 am on Jul 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I do wish google treated www.anysite.com always the same as anysite.com. Are there any reasons governing why it doesn't?

Some people prefer to use anysite.com, and some prefer www.anysite.com. There's nothing saying that a web site has to be accessible by www, and nothing saying that someone can't have anysite.com and www.anysite.com be different sites.

So, I think it should be up to the webmaster to redirect it correctly. But, many of the SE's need to improve their redirect handling too.

keeper

2:42 am on Jul 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



My personal experience is as follows:

Rebranded a site from www.widgets.com to www.foo.com.

www.widgets.com had (lets say) 100 links pointing at it. www.foo.com has no links being a new site.

Google has followed the 301 redirect I placed to find and index www.foo.com, and after a period of both domains showing up in SERP's www.widgets.com finally disappeared.

However, a white bar now shows for www.foo.com and it is not benefitting from the PR previously associated with www.widgets.com.

The Result:
Poor listing results for www.foo.com for the last 7 weeks due to Google not aggregating the two domains correctly.

My Expectation:
That Google will eventually roll the PR from the old domain over to the new domain and everything will work out....

AmericanBulldog

3:45 am on Jul 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Interesting, and I hadn't realized this was a problem until today...

This site www.domain.com/site.html has had a 301 for over 6 months, and was showing in G as www.newdomain.com in the 7th serp for it's keyword search.

Since the last update it is back to showing www.domain.com/site.html however I just scanned further down and www.newdomain.com is showing for serp #20

Obviously something is wrong with the 301 filter.