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I had www.mysite.com and www.my-site.com pointing to the same physical website. I had a decent PR, with over 500 pages indexed on www.mysite.com (the other one being there mostly as a convenience, not indexed).
One fine day, Google decided to replace all my www.mysite.com pages by www.my-site.com pages (same URL except for domain), and my PR went freefalling (I guess I lost my inbound links).
To fix this mess, I decided to setup 301 permanant redirction on www.my-site.com. At the following update, all my pages on the www.my-site.com domain were removed, but no pages from www.mysite.com showed up. I was out of Google! I figured the 301 redirection would probably take effect at the following update, but it did not. Google keeps on sending its crawler to www.my-site.com, it keeps on getting a 301, but does not follow it (I can tell from the logs).
It's been 2 updates now, and last week's crawl to the site was no different.
So I am stuck in some sort of limbo, where one site is out and the other one get back in!
Any advice?
Ajack
For one thing, I have noticed that Google follows the 301 for robots.txt, but that is pretty the only file/page for which it does....
Ajack
And yes, it shows that my 301 is setup correctly.
Ajack
P.S. Was the full URL of the permanent redirect in the <body></body> of the returned Server Header?
It does not return a <body></body>, but the "Location:" field points to the correct address (www.mysite.com).
If there is a better tool, I will gladly use it to check...
As far as the robots, your other tool said my robots file had no problems.
Thanks for helping
Ajack
Do either of the two sites show any PR? If not, then there may be a problem such as a duplicate content issue, not sure. You said...
> One fine day, Google decided to replace all my www.mysite.com pages by www.my-site.com pages.
How did Google get to the my-site.com domain? Is it possible that someone linked to it purposely to cause the problems you are now faced with? We're you promoting both domains? And, what type of redirect was set up for my-site.com before the 301 redirect went into place?
I also noticed that Google crawled my site yesterday, and went through a bunch of correct URL's (mysite.com), but still a majority of incorrect ones (my-site.com).
So maybe Googlebot was just slow to understand 301's?
The other options that I am considering are:
1) Use Google's site removal form to force removal of my-site.com from the index
2) Redirect my-site.com somewhere else, where the crawler would find a META REFRESH back to mysite.com
Any optinons on these tow methods?
Ajack
Since Google is now crawling your "correct" domain and seeing the 301s, just let it do its thing.
I wouldn't touch anything now - You've got everything in place, and if someone does try to use your
"wrong domain", they'll get 301'ed over to the right one, and so won't bookmark or link to the wrong
one. Leave everything you've got in place, and look forward to the next update! Then, use the
Google Toolbar's backwards link function (or just do a regular search for links) and find out where
the Googlebot picked up the "my-site" domain name and get that corrected.
Best,
Jim
