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
-
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Google Places Tools To Find Duplicate Listings?
Hey guys, Any recommended tools - paid or processes to find duplicate listings for Google Places? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar0 -
Reporting Webspam to Google
We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links. Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0 -
Why my site is "STILL" violating the Google quality guidelines?
Hello, I had a site with two topics: Fashion & Technology. Due to the Panda Update I decided to change some things and one of those things was the separation of these two topics. So, on June 21, I redirected (301) all the Fashion pages to a new domain. The new domain performed well the first three days, but the rankings dropped later. Now, even the site doesn't rank for its own name. So, I thought the website was penalized for any reason, and I sent a reconsideration to Google. In fact, five days later, Google confirmed that my site is "still violating the quality guidelines". I don't understand. My original site was never penalized and the content is the same. And now when it is installed on the new domain becomes penalized just a few days later? Is this penalization only a sandbox for the new domain? Or just until the old URLs disappear from the index (due to the 301 redirect)? Maybe Google thinks my new site is duplicating my old site? Or just is a temporal prevention with new domains after a redirection in order to avoid spammers? Maybe this is not a real penalization and I only need a little patience? Or do you think my site is really violating the quality guidelines? (The domain is http://www.newclothing.co/) The original domain where the fashion section was installed before is http://www.myddnetwork.com/ (As you can see it is now a tech blog without fashion sections) The 301 redirect are working well. One example of redirected URLs: http://www.myddnetwork.com/clothing-shoes-accessories/ (this is the homepage, but each page was redirected to its corresponding URL in the new domain). I appreciate any advice. Basically my fashion pages have dropped totally. Both, the new and old URLs are not ranking. 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omarinho0 -
Buying a banned domain
Hello all, I've found a exact match keyword domain that I'm able to buy. Problem is that I'm under the impression it might have been banned by google, currently it is only showing adsense without content. The site can't be found using the cache: or site: parameters in Google and the PR is 0. What are your experiences on buying a banned domain and how can I double check if the domain is banned? This blogpost suggests I should not buy it, any other opinions? Thanks. Hellemans
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellemans0