Google still listing old domain
-
Hi
We moved to a new domain back in March 2014 and redirected most pages with a 301 and submitted change of domain request through Google Webmaster tools. A couple of pages were left as 302 redirect as they had rubbish links pointing to them and we had previously had a penalty.
Google was still indexing the old domain and our rankings hadn't recovered. Last month we took away the 302 redirects and just did a blanket 301 approach from old domain to new in the the thinking that as the penalty had been lifted from the old domain there was no harm in sending everything to new domain.
Again, we submitted the change of domain in webmaster tools as the option was available to us but its been a couple of weeks now and the old domain is still indexed
Am I missing something? I realise that the rankings may not have recovered partly due to the disavowing / disregarding of several links but am concerned this may be contributing
-
Hi
I now have a robots.txt for the old site and I created a sitemap by replacing the current domain with the old one and uploaded.
Weirdly when I search for the non-www version of the old domain the pages indexed has increased!
According to WMT the Crawl postponed because robots.txt was inaccessible however I've checked it returns status 200 and the Robots.txt Tester says it's successful even though it never updates the timestamp.
-
Hi Marie
Many thanks for your response,
I've just looked in Webmater tools at the old domain and the option to change domains is there again but I also noticed when looking at the crawl errors there was a message along the lines of crawl postponed as robots.txt was inaccessible.
At the moment it's just a blanket redirect at IIS level so following your advice I'll re-establish the old site's robots.txt and a sitemap and see if Google crawls the 301's to the new domain.
In some ways I'm glad I haven't missed anything but would be nice if just the new domain indexed after all this time !
Thanks again
-
This is odd. The pages all seem to redirect from the old site to the new, so why is Google still indexing those old pages?
I can't see the robots.txt on the old site as it redirects, but is it possible that the robots.txt on fhr-net.co.uk is blocking Google? If this is the case, then Google probably wouldn't be able to see the old site and recognize the redirects.
It may also help to add a sitemap for the old site and also to ask Google to fetch and render the old site's pages and then submit them to the index. This should cause the 301's to be seen and processed by Google.
-
Even after all this time, there are still over 700 pages indexed on our old domain even though we have submitted the change of address twice in Webmaster tools, the second one being about 6 months ago if not longer
old domain is www.fhr-net.co.uk
Any advice would be appreciated
-
No worries,
I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question
-
I think that I'm so used to answering questions about penalized sites that I assumed that you had moved domains because of a penalty. My apologies!
Sounds like you've got the right idea.
-
Thanks for responses,
One week on and since submitting the second change of domain in GWT we've seen the number of pages indexed for the old domain drop from over 1300 to around 700 this week which is something
Regarding the redirect debate, it's an interesting read thanks for sending that. Isn't the situation the same as a site that didn't have a penalty in that you should be monitoring your backlink profile and reconfiguring or disavowing links outside the guidelines whilst carrying out activities that will naturally build decent links and therefore redress the balance?
-
This doesn't answer your question, but I just wanted to point out that the 301 or 302 redirects are not a good idea. Even if you got the penalty lifted, there still can be unnatural links there that can harm you in the eyes of the Penguin algorithm. A 301 will redirect those bad links to the new site. A 302, if left in place long enough will do the same.
Here's an article I wrote today that goes into greater detail:
-
Oh, it may be that it's the other way around with canonical URL-s. At least according to Google (here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033086?hl=en
- _Each destination URL should have a self-referencing rel="canonical" meta tag. _
-
Hmm.. certainly someone with more experience than myself would have a more elegant solution, but I would still try to do this by establishing the canonical URL because you don't want to delist: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066#6
If you can configure your server, you can use
rel="canonical"
HTTP headers to indicate the canonical URL for HTML documents and other files such as PDFs. Say your site makes the same PDF available via different URLs (for example, for tracking purposes), like this:_http://www.example.com/downloads/white-paper.pdf http://www.example.com/downloads/partner-1/white-paper.pdf http://www.example.com/downloads/partner-2/white-paper.pdf http://www.example.com/downloads/partner-3/white-paper.pdf_
In this case, you can use a
rel="canonical"
HTTP header to specify to Google the canonical URL for the PDF file, as follows:Link: <http: www.example.com="" downloads="" white-paper.pdf="">; rel="canonical"</http:>
-
Hi there
The old pages don't exist any more to add the canonical they're 301's from old domain to new but over 1000 pages show up for site:www.fhr-net.co.uk
-
Got it, you must have tried adding the canonical URL meta tags already, right? If not, check out: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
"...in late 2009, Google announced support for cross-domain use of rel=canonical. This is typically for syndicated content, when you’re concerned about duplication and only want one version of the content to be eligible for ranking...
..First off, Google may choose to ignore cross-domain use of rel=canonical if the pages seem too different or it appears manipulative. The ideal use of cross-domain rel=canonical would be a situation where multiple sites owned by the same entity share content, and that content is useful to the users of each individual site. In that case, you probably wouldn’t want to use 301-redirects (it could confuse users and harm the individual brands), but you may want to avoid duplicate content issues and control which property Google displays in search results. I would not typically use rel=canonical cross-domain just to consolidate PageRank..."
-
Thanks for your reply,
It's not that I want to de-list the old domain as I would rather people get to the site using that domain than not at all but, my concern is that for whatever reason the transfer hasn't completed as it's been such a long time and we're for instance not getting the full benefit of sites linking to the old domain passed to the new one
-
If your goal is to delist the old domain I am going to copy the answer I just gave at http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-exclude-all-pages-on-a-subdomain-for-search, simply because it's clear and works quickly (48h) in my experience.
This is the authoritative way that Google recommends at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en&rd=1:
- Add an robots.txt file for your domain. Usually via FTP. Add the "noindex" meta-tags to every page as well.
- Add your subdomain as a separate site in Google Webmaster Tools
- On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, click Google Index on the left-hand menu.
- Click Remove URLs.
- Click New removal request.
- Type the URL of the page you want removed from search results (not the Google search results URL or cached page URL), and then click Continue. How to find the right URL. The URL is case-sensitive—use exactly the same characters and capitalization that the site uses.
- Click Yes, remove this page.
- Click Submit Request.
To exclude the entire domain, simply enter the domain URL (e.g. http://domain.com) at the 7th step.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Old competitor site but GMB listing no more, are links still valuable?
One of my clients has come into the possession of a competitor's website. They sat on it for a while (other things going on) and because the company ceased trading the GMB listing seems to have been removed by Google and the leads have dropped off since this loss. The links are OK, so am considering 301 redirects, if the links still pass any value.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids
Linking Domains 98
Domain Authority 23
Spam Score 2 % Are the links likely to still pass value? Also in terms of updating the WHOIS info what's the best approach?0 -
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Does google still not crawl forms with a method=post?
I know back in 08 Google started crawling forms using the method=get however not method=post. whats the latest? is this still valid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Turkey0 -
What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?
Hi, Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info. The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months. Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter. Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name? Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google Indexed Old Backups Help!
I have the bad habit of renaming a html page sitting on my server, before uploading a new version. I usually do this after a major change. So after the upload, on my server would be "product.html" as well as "product050714".html. I just stumbled on the fact G has been indexing these backups. Can I just delete them and produce a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Google isn't seeing the content but it is still indexing the webpage
When I fetch my website page using GWT this is what I receive. HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy
X-Pantheon-Styx-Hostname: styx1560bba9.chios.panth.io
server: nginx
content-type: text/html
location: https://www.inscopix.com/
x-pantheon-endpoint: 4ac0249e-9a7a-4fd6-81fc-a7170812c4d6
Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400
Content-Length: 0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:29:38 GMT
X-Varnish: 2640682369 2640432361
Age: 326
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive What I used to get is this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.23 (Amazon)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.18
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 +0000
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
ETag: "1365696024"
Content-Language: en
Link: ; rel="canonical",; rel="shortlink"
X-Generator: Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:sioc="http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#"
xmlns:sioct="http://rdfs.org/sioc/types#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"> <title>Inscopix | In vivo rodent brain imaging</title>0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0