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The angelfire site ranks higher than mysite.com. Could that higher ranking be hurting my placement with mysite.com? And is there anyway that I can permanently redirect people and spiders on an angelfire site so that the angelfire site will eventually fall away?
Jennifer
I'm not sure about the re-direct. If you can somehow output HTTP headers within angelfire you could use a 3** re-direct. I assume "301 Moved Permenently" is the most sensible one to use, though that's worth clarifying as you hear of sob stories involving redirects ;)
Also it's good practice to do link:youroldwebsite.com on google and perhaps another SE and request that your old links be updated to point to your new domain. It's most likely the old site is ranking higher because of the links.
There are some older threads about moving domains on the site. Try something like "site:webmasterworld.com moving domains" on google.....that might bring up some older threads on the subject.
As regards your question about ranking, well, you are probably still ranking higher on your old site purely because of old links to it. Google doesn't show links below about PR4, and a lot of Webmasters bury their links page far enough down from the home page that the PR that they give away isn't that high. Try AllTheWeb to search for links.
If you believe that the original PageRank algorithm still holds, then 85% of the PR on your old page ought to come to your new page and augment any PR that the new page enjoys straight from the outside world via updated links. This being the case, you won't lose much PR with this extra hiccup that will, of course, gradually have less and less effect as you chase people to link to the new page.
At the moment, I suspect you're seeing
a) latency with people not updating THEIR links pages to you
b) latency with Google not yet spidering their changes (my links page only seems to get spidered about every 2 months!
DerekH
I will refer to our website domain as domain.net and the other domain as domain.co.uk.
Now, domain.net was in at #5 for my keywords and domain.co.uk was at #3 for my keywords. Both sites were in a related field obviously but the site at #3 (domain.co.uk) was no longer to be used so I put a web forwarding on domain.co.uk to point to domain.net. This was added 14 days ago, 2 days later, I noticed that domain.net was no longer at #5 but domain.co.uk was still in at #3 but with the descriptive content of domain.net that used to be at #5. Needless to say, I removed the forwarding on domain.co.uk to domain.net and now does not resolve to a any document root and shows an access denied message now when its browsed to (i.e you do not have permission to access this server) which I assume is good enough for google to realise its gone.
I have now seen domain.net re-appear in the index for my keywords for a day or 2 and then it reverts back to domain.net. I cant help thinking that I wont be able to recover from this. Should I setup a vhost for domain.co.uk with a 301 redirect from [domain.co.uk...] to go to [domain.net...] which will tell google it has moved or should i leave it as it is with domain.co.uk pointing to nothing and domain.net as it has always been?
My old site only has two links pointing to it, less than my newer site on google. Although, those two sites happen to be the google directory and musicmoz (. I submitted the change to google since both sites are dmoz sites (although I'm sure I must have done this a long time ago too...).
I've had the meta redirect up for about two years, maybe I should be using a different "version" of it?
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="3; url=http://www.domain.com" />I just checked alltheweb, there certainly are more there, thanks for that tip. :p
Jennifer
> I have now seen domain.net re-appear in the index for my keywords for a day or 2 and then it reverts back to domain.net. I cant help thinking that I wont be able to recover from this. Should I setup a vhost for domain.co.uk with a 301 redirect from http://www.domain.co.uk to go to http://www.domain.net which will tell google it has moved
Yes.
Then wait - it may take 30 to 60 days to update. Incoming links from high-PR pages may help it update more frequently because of Google's freshbot action, but it may drop in and out over the 30 to 60 day period.
Generally, better results (responses) may be obtained by starting your own thread unless your circumstances are identical to those already being discussed.
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Jennifer,
Last time I had anything to do with AngelFire, the on-page meta-refresh was the only choice. Just get your incoming links updated to the extent possible, and replace the AngelFire page content, title, and description with a simple "We have Moved" message... This may help to keep it from "competing" with your new site in the search results.
Your site must be listed in the Open Directory, which is where Google gets their directory info. Make sure you submitted a URL update request to dmoz.org, not Google, and only submit it once.
Jim
Jennifer
Good luck and peace to all!
Jennifer
