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
-
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Changing domain names but still ranking as old one
Hi there, I have a client who changed domain names back in November 2015 but is still coming up in search engines with their old domain name not their new one. For example, I search for my clients name, let's call them Example B. So I search for "Example B" and within the search results they come up top and the title tag is correct as it says something along the lines of "Welcome to Example B". However the URL underneath is actually their old name which is Example A. When you click on the link, it redirects over to the new name so thats fine, but it's just annoying that Example A is still appearing when it should be Example B now. I don't think they have a new Webmaster Tools account setup for their new domain (I need to check still), but they do still have their old one setup. Is there something I can do within Webmaster Tools to tell it that Example A is now gone and to start indexing and referring to them as Example B? What else should I do to make sure their new name is coming up not their old one anymore?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
Client wants a seperate .tv domain for their media/videos instead of a subdomain/subfolder. What is the best way to pass of link equity to a new domain?
We have a client that wants to place their video content on a .tv tld instead of a subfolder/subdomain in their .com website. They believe that the .tv domain will better represent the media experience of their business. We can understand this client's position however we are concerned about their .tv domain will lose out on the link equity if it were no longer placed in the .com's subdomain/subfolder. Here are our questions: 1. What would be the best way to pass of link equity from .com website to a new .tv domain? Should we just have a video link on the .com website that 301 directs to the new .tv domain? 2. Is there any SEO benefit of having a .tv domain for Google Video queries or even Youtube? 3. Is there any long term value of having two different websites? For link equity purposes we understand that it would be better if everything was in a .com. However is a .tv domain ideal for a better representation of their media content? We appreciate any feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Why domain authority increase
Hi all Our domian authority has increased from 39 to 42 last week. We have been improving our metadata and removing bad backlinks recently. Is there any other reason or updates last week that would have resulted in this increase? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
Root domain or sub domain? WWW. or NOT WWW......
I am a little confused! I use vidahost whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigyboy1 -
Why do i not receive google traffic?
over the 4-5 months i have published over 3000 unique articles which i have payed well over 10 000usd for, but i still only receive about 20 google visitors a day for that content. i uploaded the 3000 articles after i 301 redirected the old site to a a new domain (old site had 1000 articles, and at least 300visits from google a day), and all the old conetnt receives the traffic fine (301 redirect is working 100percent now and pr went from 0 to 3pr) articles are also good ranging from 400-800 words. 90 percent of them are indexed by google, most of them have been bookmarked to digg reddit etc website domain is over 10 years old - alltopics.com why google doesnt send me the traffic i deserve?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rxesiv0