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Here's the situation...
SITE A: Old very clean site completely redone. All old pages were replaced with new and 301's were used on all old pages. 98% of all the 301's point to the home page since there wasn't any better places to send them in the new site.
SITE B: Another related old site was shut down and 301'd to SITE A.
SITE A was done around April/May, SITE B was redirected around June/July. Google now only shows the backlinks from SITE B for SITE A. Google is not showing the backlinks for SITE A at all. It's been this way for at least 2 months now.
For reference, SITE A was a PR7 SITE B was a PR6, both sites have 1000+ backlinks of which I've seen Google show around 200 for each of them in the past. Now SITE A is a PR6 on the home page and [b]no other pages show PR or show any new backlinks[/b] even though new PR4+ backlinks have been created to some of these newer pages and they are in the Google's cache. All ranking has disappeared.
One other thing - I noticed today that both sites have old URLs that no longer exist listed in Google. They just show the URL and nothing else. I can't be totally sure but I think this is somehow due to my 301 set up since some of the pages were not listed in Google before I did the redirects. They had been removed from the site for over a year.
These sites are and always have been very clean, so I suspect something's up with the 301's I'm using. So, here's that set up to:
*** SITE A .htaccess ***
DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html
redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.DomainOfSiteA.com/directory/index.html
redirect 301 /oldpage2.htm http://www.DomainOfSiteA.com
redirect 301 /index.html http://www.DomainOfSiteA.com
...continues for about 15 more page redirects.
*** SITE B .htaccess ***
RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.DomainOfSiteA.com
Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated. I've been tearing my hair out over this one.
Thanks!
The easy reply would be "this is one of those cases where writing Google is the only thing to do". Perhaps it is really the only feasible thing to do. Google has always been a bit silent about the details of these matters, which is understandable, as there are some possibilities for abuse, and of course they will need to have some amount of countermeasures.
In addition to this, quite a few Google changes have taken place since May, which means that there is also a chance that your sites have been hit by an unfortunate combination of events.
As nobody outside Google knows the exact workings of these things, contacting Google and explaining the situation might be the best option, as they do have the opportunity for manual correction of things that their great calculator puts in the wrong pile for some odd reason.
Three questions:
1) Did you take over site A from a previous owner and then change it?
2) Site B - did you have duplicate pages on the two domains before doing the 301?
3) The "ghost pages" - did you put up the 301s to those pages on site A after seeing 404 errors, in an attempt to catch the traffic coming from some links that you could not really get changed?
- of course i assume that you have used a server header tool to check that your pages actually return a 301 header?
The following example is purely fictional, and might be completely wrong - some of it is wrong for sure, and the rest just might be. All similarities to existing persons, firms, situations, trademarks or anything else is unintentional:
Then you take down all his pages, put new prescription drug pages on the site and enjoy the stream of gardening visitors ending up with a solid supply of medication - after all, they are related subjects. To further increase your income, you redirect your old drug site to the new, in order to get double backlinks and possibly even higher PR, so that you can beat all those spammy sites in the SERPS.
Trouble is, Goodie the search engine don't think it should be that easy. At least not for you - everybody else might do it, but for some reason you can't. Perhaps it's some conspiracy or whatever, we will never know.
Changing a site is one thing. This might occur for several good and beneficial reasons, that don't even have to involve pr0n or drugs. If some pages move in the process, setting up a 301 redirect is even a good thing.
The problem is that some people see a potential income from buying sites with high PR and lots of backlinks. It's okay if i change my site from gardening to drugs, but if someone else buys my gardening site and then changes it to a drugs site, then a certain search engine might hold the view that such people should not be able to inherit my links. In stead they should be collecting their own.
It's not that they dislike entrepreneurs, it's just a simple measure to protect the value of backlinks, upon which they built their own business before diversifying into advertising and stuff. I'm not even sure they thought that way in May. If they didn't do anything about it you could continue using somebody elses backlinks for site A, just like if it was your own site that changed subject.
So, assuming you did not take over someone elses site, you were probably allright when you made the initial change of site A. These changes would have taken approximately a month to propagate through the great Google calculator in May, and possibly even more.
Then a month later, as you should start to see the results, you point another domain at site A. Not only that, you tell googlebot "this and that page is permanently moved to site A". The effect of this - just like the other stuff - would take around a month or even more to propagate. Around that time, Google starts to implement all kinds of odd internal changes as well, and this goes on for an extended period of time, i'm not even sure it's finished yet. There might be some bad timing issues here, only Google knows.
What would a semi-intelligent bot "think" about this:
(1) you own both sites, and
(2) site A has recently been reworked completely, and
(3) you move site B permanently to domain A, and
(4) two sites can not be on one domain, sharing the very same front page (the one at www.example.com/)
...my guess is: That the original site A does no longer exist, in stead, site B has taken site A's place. So, should site B be credited with the backlinks for site A? No, not really. It's nothing but a move of site B from one domain to another, so site B should still be site B and not a mixture of site B and site A.
So, site B gets a new domain name, and site A ceases to exist.
This reaction from the bot might even be a bug or an error. I recall a series of posts not so long ago, that claimed that you could harm a high PR page by redirecting to it from a low PR page. Of course this could not be intentional, as that is too big an opportunity for manipulation. I think it is solved now, as i have not seen any of these posts for a while.
Still, for the special task of merging two sites, a 301 might have to be used with caution. Merging two sites is not the same thing as changing a domain name, or changing a page location - and it is the latter cases the 301 is intended for.
Anyway, you could set up a rewrite rule on this one IP rewriting any URL on domain B to domain A just to avoid potential trouble. See post #22 of this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
Some pages on the internet link to some pages on site A or site B that no longer exist. Googlebot sees those links, follows them and gets a 404. No page found, no page to index. Could be an error, so next time around it tries again. Same thing. Perhaps it even tries each and every time. That would probably give less overhead than doing lookups of past 404's.
I don't really think it needs to see a 404 more than one time before that page is declared dead and removed from the index.
A page is removed from the index. Links still exist, so some 404's are served. Suddently, a year later it's no longer a 404, but a 301 in stead. The spider follows it gladly, but the indexer gets confused. The exact url that the link points to is still not a page, but it's no nothing either, and the page the spider delivered is already in the index. The page that wasn't there has been moved...and the new location is occupied by a page that is in the index already - rather strange i'd say.
I don't know what Google will end up doing with these pages, but it can hardly replace the existing page with a 404 and the 301 redirect can hardly have a PR to pass on, as a redirect is not a page. The page that is supposed to be moved permanently is not a page either, it's a 404 error - it seems there is a logical flaw somewhere, perhaps it's just me, i don't know.
(a) Return "404 Not found" for pages that no longer exist
(b1) Redirect 302 all requests on site B to front page of site A, or
(b2-1) Point domain B to same IP as domain A, and
(b2-2) make a 301 permanent redirect from B to A on that IP, as in link above
If this does not work in a few weeks, then:
(c) mail Google and
(d) blame me for messing it even more up than it was already
- perhaps you should just skip (a) and (b) and go directly for (c), in which case you can forget (d). It seems a bit complicated and i might have gotten it all wrong, that's not unlikely at all - Google is the only one that has a fair chance of knowing what happened for sure.
/claus
1) Did you take over site A from a previous owner and then change it?
Yes. However the site's focus is the same. No switch like gardening to drugs, more like lame gardening to better gardening :)
2) Site B - did you have duplicate pages on the two domains before doing the 301?
No.
3) The "ghost pages" - did you put up the 301s to those pages on site A after seeing 404 errors, in an attempt to catch the traffic coming from some links that you could not really get changed?
Sort of. I knew I needed to 301 certain pages, but they were 404ing for a little while.
of course i assume that you have used a server header tool to check that your pages actually return a 301 header?
Yes, everything looked ok there.
For merging two domains, i would simply point both domains to the same IP address in the DNS records (or forward one to the other somehow, with a 302 status code). I'm not even sure i would bother about duplicate issues these days, as the new googlebot seems to be able to handle this (at least for the special case of 100% identical "sites" on same IP - ie. one site at one IP with more than one domain name owned by same entity).
Anyway, you could set up a rewrite rule on this one IP rewriting any URL on domain B to domain A just to avoid potential trouble. See post #22 of this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]This sounds very interesting. I think I can do this (I'll have to check). Will this allow site A to keep it's own backlinks and the backlinks of site B? Seems like it would, if so what's the point of permanently redirecting a site to another using a 301?
Thanks a lot for the feedback so far!
That is for moving a site or a page. Merging two sites is not the same as moving one of them. You can't both have a "page a" that has its own existence and web space and point "page b" to occupy the exact same web space as "page a" - that URL's not big enough for two of them, one of them has got to go.
You are clearly saying (on site B) that "this page is permanently moved to that other location". That means that the "other location" becomes equal to "this page", ie. site B takes over the domain of site A. As you own both sites this does make some sense.
I even think it's fair that the less powerful site B takes over the higher PR site A, as if someone wishes to terminate a high PR site in favour of a low PR site, they should clearly be allowed to do so. Afaik, most webmasters couldn't care less about Google PR, even though it might sound absurd to members of this forum.
/claus
