Google , 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.
-
Google, 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.
This is my first post here. I would like to begin by thanking anyone in advance for their help. It is much appreciated. Secondly, I'm posting in the wrong place or something please forgive me simply point me in the right direction I'm a quick learner.
I think I'm battling a redirect problem but I want to be sure before I make changes. In order to accurately assess the situation a little background is necessary.
I have had a site called tx-laws.com for about 15 years. It was a site that was used primarily by private resource and as such was never SEO'd. The site itself was in fact quite Seo unfriendly. despite a complete lack of marketing or SEO efforts, over time, SEO aside, this domain eventually made it to page one of Google Yahoo and Bing under the keywords Texas laws.
About six months ago I decided to revamp the site and create a new resource aimed at a public market. A good deal of effort was made to re-work the SEO. The new site was developed at a different domain name: easylawlook up.com. Within a few months this domain name surpassed tx-laws in Google and was holding its place in position number eight out of 190 million results.
Note that at this point no marketing has been done, that is to say there has been no social networking, no e-mail campaigns, no blogs, -- nothing but content.
All was well until a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade our network and our servers. During this period there was some downtime unfortunately. When the upgrade was complete everything seemed fine until a week or so later when our primary domain easy law look up vanished off Google. At first I thought it was downtime but now I'm not so sure.
The current configuration reroutes traffic from tx-laws to easylawlookup in IIS by pointing both domains to the same root directory. Everything else was handled through scripting. As far as I know this is how it was always set up. At present there is no 301 Redirect in place for tx-laws (as I'm sure there probably should be).
Interestingly enough the back links to easylaw also went away. Even more telling however is that now when I visit link: easylawlookup.com there is only one link, and that link is to a domain which references tx-laws not easy law. So it would appear that I have confused Google with regards to my actual intentions.
My question is this. Right now my rankings for tx-laws remain unchanged. The last thing I want to have happen is to see those disappear as well. If easy law has somehow been penalized and I redirect tx-laws to easy through a 301 will I screw up my rankings for this domain as well?
Any comments or input on the situation are welcome. I just want to think it through before I start making more changes which might make things worse instead of better. Ultimately though, there is no reason that the old domain can't be redirected to the new domain at this point unless it would mean that I run the risk of losing my listings for tx-laws, ending up with nothing instead of transferring any link juice and traffic to easy law.
With regards to the down time, it was substantial over a couple of weeks with many hours off-line. However this downtime would have affected both domains the only difference being that the one domain had been in existence for 15 years as opposed to six months for the other.
So is my problem downtime, lack of proper 301 redirect, or something else? and if I implement a 301 at this point do I risk damaging the remaining domain which is operational?
Thanks again for any help.
-
Hi Steven,
Sha provided some great information here. Was it of help to you? Is there anything more we can help answer for you?
-
Hi Steven,
OK, having looked more closely at your question and done some more investigation, it seems there are two major issues.
The first is as I mentioned, the fact that the non www is broken. I believe that this is because you do not have a setting enabled to allow the www and the non www to share the same location. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what you need to do to fix this, but have reached out to one of the SEOmoz Associates and hope that he will be able to help out.
Secondly, the fact that you have both domains pointed at the same root directory means that:
- Your domains are seen as exact duplicates of each other (a serious duplicate content issue)
- None of the link value from the original domain or any external links pointing at it are being passed to the new site.
So, the two things you need to do are
- Fix the non www /www issue
- Create a 301 Redirect that will send each page of the old site to the corresponding page on the new domain.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Hi Steven,
Welcome to Q&A
I think there may actually be a few issues here which are not helping, so am going to take a little time and do a bit more analysis so we can try to eliminate all of the problems, but there is one thing that seems worrying:
The non www version of your domain http://easylawlookup.com/ returns a 404 (Not Found) Error, while the www version http://www.easylawlookup.com/ loads correctly. My first guess on why you have lost rankings so suddenly would be that the other pages that were indexed in Google happened to be the non www version of the URLs - so when Googlebot tried to crawl and the site was down, then returned a 404 Error, those pages were dropped from the index.
It is also possible that the majority of your external links were set to point to the non www URLs.
If this was the case and your changes took down the server, then returned it with the non www no longer accessible, then all of your incoming link value would have also disappeared overnight.
I cannot say at this point exactly why the non www is broken and since ours is a LAMP Shop, I am not about to hazard a guess on what might be happening in your Windows setup to make this happen. There are definitely some IIS ninjas around the SEOmoz community though, so I'm sure someone will be able to jump in on the thread and provide some guidance on that.
General practice is to 301 either of the non www or www to the other (choose the one you prefer and redirect the other to it). This ensures that all of the incoming link value and traffic benefits a single domain. It also eliminates any possibility of the two being seen as duplicates of each other. There is no point trying to set a 301 though if there is something fundamentally wrong in the system.
So, the first task is to work out why the non www is returning a 404 and to fix the problem.
In the meantime, I would leave the old domain as is - I'll do a little more digging and get back to you soon.
Hope that helps
Sha
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
-
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
301 Redirect Question
I am working with a website and I ran a Screaming Frog and noticed there are 4,600 301's on the website (www.srishoes.com). It seems like the issue is between the www. and without it and they aren't working together. Is this something that the website provider should update and what type of impact might this have on the site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ReunionMarketing
Matt0 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | | ztalk1120 -
Google not show results for my domain as keyword
Hello seomoz! The problem My issue is that from around 28-7-2014 when i search on google "domain.com" it doesn`t return any webpages of my website. What is working as it should I get results for the homepage if i search any other keywords. For example if i search "site:domain.com" i get many results including the homepage. Other helpful information On Google webmaster tools i didn`t receive any message regarding this, or a penalty.
Technical SEO | | vatraxos
Also at manual actions there is nothing. The traffic coming from google didn`t dropped. Actually the last weeks i have an increase on visits Any idea what could be wrong ? Any solution for this? Thanks a lot for your time!0 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
301 redirects and OSE
We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links. I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE. Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site. I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit. What am I missing? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0 -
Canonical tag, CNAME and 301 redirect
I have a website with a couple of domains pointing to one IP address. Let's say I have two domains www.example.com and www.example.ca I also see during my SEO analysis that the example.com and the www.example.com (same for the example.ca and the www.example.ca) are triggering server responses. How do I deal with this issue for best SEO. Canonical links? CNAME, or 301 redirects? thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
301 redirect issues
Hi all, I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with an extermley frustrating problem with 301 redirects in .htaccess. Basically I'm trying to redirect some old pages (from our old website) that stil rank to the new equivilent. For example - old url = www.domain.com/frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 New www.domain.com/news/article-title I've tried the simple redirect 301 /frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 http://www.domain.com/news/article-title But this doesnt work. I've also tried - RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^newsStoryID=395$
RewriteRule ^/news-reader.php$ http://www.domain.com/news/article-title/? [L,R=301] Could anyone help? I've followed lots of tutorials that all match the above but it just doesn't work! The only other thing within the htaccess file is from wordpress for pretty permalinks - BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Many thanks in advance!0