Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
-
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions.
When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again.
If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse.
All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue?
None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain.
Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
-
Susan,
Have not heard back from you.
Does this help?
Have you tried this method?
Looking for additional insight?
-
One thing about the navigating directly to an IP address, that will work as long as it's a dedicated IP because you're circumventing the name server, i.e. you can go to cnn.com via http://157.166.226.26/ and not be redirected to www.cnn.com because you're not being processed via the name server.
-
The IP address issue is more of an Apache issue as you have already mentioned, but the IP won't play into this issue.
There are 2 ways to help this fix itself:
- Add Canonicals to all your pages,
- Use an htaccess file with this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[0-9]+(.[0-9]+){3} [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bradyid.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bradyid.com/$1 [L,R=301]This will fix a few things, 1 removing anything that is linked to the IP address to be forwarded to the domain version, move anything that is linked to the mis-configured Apache to resolve properly.
This shouldn't work: http://12.69.60.161/ but it does.
Where's the xml sitemap? add that to your to-do list
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
-
Proper 301 redirect code for http to https
I see lots of suggestions on the web for forwarding http to https. I've got several existing sites that want to take advantage of the SSL boost for SEO (however slight) and I don't want to lose SEO placements in the process. I can force all pages to be viewed through the SSL - that's no problem. But for SEO reasons, do I need to do a 301 redirect line of code for every page in the site to the new "https" version? Or is there a way to catch all with one line of code that Google, etc. will recognize & honor?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith10 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
Umbrella company and multiple domains
I'm really sorry for asking this question yet again. I have searched through previous answers but couldn't see something exactly like this I think. There is a website called example .com. It is a sort of umbrella company for 4 other separate domains within it - 4 separate companies. The Home page of the "umbrella" company website is example.com. It is just an image with no content except navigation on it to direct to the 4 company websites. The other pages of website example.com are the 4 separate companies domains. So on the navigation bar there is : Home page = example.com company1page = company1domain.com company2page= company2domain.com etc. etc. Clicking "home" will take you back to example.com (which is just an image). How bad or good is this structure for SEO? Would you recommend any changes to help them rank better? The "home" page has no authority or links, and neither do 3 out of the 4 other domains. The 4 companies websites are independent in content (although theme is the same). What's bringing them altogether is under this umbrella website - example.com. Thank you
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
CNAME vs 301 redirect
Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
Technical SEO | | Houdoe
www.maindomain.eu
www.maindomain.com
www.otherdomain.nl
www.otherdomain.com
... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
Hans0 -
Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
Technical SEO | | Evo0 -
How to remove a sub domain from Google Index!
Hello, I have a website having many subdomains having same copy of content i think its harming my SEO for that site since abc and xyz sub domains do have same contents. Thus i require to know i have already deleted required subdomain DNS RECORDS now how to have those pages removed from Google index as well ? The DNS Records no more exists for those subdomains already.
Technical SEO | | anand20100 -
200 Redirects for SEO instead of 301
We are working with a company on re-platforming our website. On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s. I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.
Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect0