Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain
-
Hi,
We changed our domain from coedmagazine.com to coed.com in April'13.
Applied 301 redirects on all pages, submitted 'change of address' to google but we still see site:coedmagazine.com fetching 130K results on google as opposed to site:coed.com fetches 40K results.
Can anybody here throw some light on what might be going wrong?
[ Site runs on wordpress, hosted with wordpress as well ]
thank you
-
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for elaborating on advanced queries, those help us to see how many of our pages are indexed thus far. It alarming that we see more than 120K pages on old domain unlike 40K on new domain even after 6 months.
We zeroed on not having a consolidated site map with all the new urls fed to google might be the reason as for the limitations of our CMS, we were not able to generate that at domain change. But we are in the process of generating and see where it takes us.
thank you,
-
Hey Robert,
I see why your "site:" search might trouble you a bit but... have you lost any rankings or organic traffic since the change? I don't think I'd worry too much about Google's "site:" function as they've been fairly non-caring about advanced queries lately and more worried about parsing user intent and questions. Since they're going for MEANING and INTENT over technical semantics I would say returning results for both domains when one is sitewide 301 redirected to another is fairly accurate in terms of SERPs.
That being said it sounds like you have most of the obvious ducks in a row reading through your other responses. Does both the www version and non-www version redirect? People link to both so Google may be showing results for one or the other.
I probably wouldn't expect these numbers EVER to fully line up. IE you'll never see ZERO RESULTS FOUND for a page that has a ton of links and text using the old domain.
Example: https://www.google.com/#q=site:seomoz.org
Still showing lots of results. Just not sure I see the value or reason for caring about what shows up in a "site:" search much these days particularly when Google is ultimately showing people relevant results with that query. If you're losing organic traffic vs April and you think it's related then that's a different story.
Good luck!
Jacob -
Hi Steve,
We refresh the sitemap.xml on the regular basis and submit it to google with the latest content and hence had all links referencing new domain.
thank you
-
I have never used godaddy hosting. I am sorry but I am not familiar with how this works.
-
Hi, In Apr'13, Within 'Change Of Address', I verified both coedmagazine.com and www.coedmagazine.com to coed.com which resulted in 'option to withdraw request' and a message saying the notification will remain in effect for 180 days. But after your reply, I went back and checked the status but it is back to a normal 'change of address' page accepting a new request.
How do I know the status of the earlier request as I was not sure if it is successful or not?
Regarding crawl and index reports on old domain, they have considerably dropped but still 100K pages are indexed on old domain and crawl reports show around 100 404 pages but when i click those links, they redirect me to 404 page on new domain.
Thanks for robots.txt verification tool, will work to resolve them.
thanks again
-
Thanks for the re-direct checkup tool. I verified the URLs and it says 'Search Engine Friendly'
Regarding parking domain: We are on wordpress hosting which provides us an interface to choose a primary domain, which was updated to coed.com from coedmagazine.com. This update automatically does fetch content referring to the new domain.
What I have not done: Hard redirect of coedmagazine.com to coed.com at domain level with my registrar ( godaddy ). Will doing this have any effect?
-
Again, this might be an obvious thing to check but do you have a sitemap.xml submitted to Google that has the old domain links? The 301 and GWT configuration should override this but you never know!
-
I know you said you submitted a change of address to Google in Google Webmaster Tools, but did you add and verify coed.com as the specified domain name for both coedmagazine.com and coed.com? This is highlighted as an Important step on https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en.
Assuming you do have both domain names verified in GWT, one suggestion would be to take a look at the Crawl Errors/Index Status for both domain names to see if there are any issues with Google not following the 301s correctly or somehow still accessing the site through the old domain name.
Also, make sure to check the robots.txt file within GWT to see if Google has any problems with it (I checked coed.com/robots.txt through http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml and encountered some errors, but they may be too minor to affect Google).
-
You have probably done these but I will ask just in case....
Is your redirect working properly? You can test it at.. http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php and determine if you have search engine friendly 301.
Is your redirect handling all possible versions of your domain... like www.example.com and example.com?
Is your new domain properly parked on the old domain?
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
-
Wrong Search words coming in search console
Hey there, My website All good but, in webmaster Search console some bad Queries(search terms) coming which is totally different from website. I want to make sure, is that harmful for my website traffic, as well as keywords Ranking?? How should i stop them to be crawl, ?? can any help for this query.?? i have attached screenshot of that, please check & help out, http://prntscr.com/cmusoq Thnx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Domain.com/postname vs. Domain.com/blog/postname
I am wondering what is the best practice regarding blogs? I read that it would be best to structure a website like a pyramide instead of a flat panckage But I have seen many blogs where the post shows right after the domain name. Domain.com/postname instead of Domains/blog/postname My point is that if a website has many post then the structure will get very flat and this will maybe make your most optimized and important pages less important to google domain.com/page a) What do you think about this, which one of the two blog solutions do you prefer and why? b) in context to blog If for instance you had a keyword like Copenhagen property would you then consider renaming your blog to realetateagent.com/Copenhagen-property-news/post-name c) Would write a little intro like 200 words for the page 1 of your blog and add in some keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
GTM Migration from Old to New Verison as Old Version closing on 1st April
Hi Guys, Can you please tell me is it a correct configuration for tracking thank you page? In Old Version of Tag Manager - GA conversion Tracking, tag type - universal analytic, web property id - UA-12345678-9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devdan
track type - transaction, Firing rule -{{url}} contains ordersuccessful.aspx, {{event}} equals gtm.dom In New Version of Tag Manager - Choose Product - Google Analytic, choose tag type - universal analytic, configure tag - tracking id - UA-12345678-9, track type - transaction, Fire on -Name - order successful page, type - custom event, Filter- Page url contains ordersuccessful.aspx, event equals gtm.dom If i remove event equals gtm.dom will tag fire and transaction details will reflect in google analytic? I am doing Manually configuration in new version of GTM as i have only few tags so just want to know if all tags successfully configured & I placed new GTM code on my website then google analytic will start reflecting data at same moment right, it will not take 24 hours right? Thanks! Dev0 -
When you can't see the cache in search, is it about to be deindexed?
Here is my issue and I've asked a related question on this one. Here is the back story. Site owner had a web designer build a duplicate copy of their site on their own domain in a sub folder without noindexing. The original site tanked, the webdesigner site started outranking for the branded keywords. Then the site owner moved to a new designer who rebuilt the site. That web designer decided to build a dev site using the dotted quad version of the site. It was isolated but then he accidentally requested one image file from the dotted quad to the official site. So Google again indexed a mirror duplicate site (the second time in 7 months). Between that and the site having a number of low word count pages it has suffered and looked like it got hit again with Panda. So the developer 301 the version to the correct version. I was rechecking it this morning and the dotted quad version is still indexed, but it no longer lets me look at the cache version. Out of experience, is this just Google getting ready to drop it from the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page?
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page? If I have 4 or 5 different hashtag link section pages , consolidated into one HTML Page, no chance to get one of the Hashtag Pages to appear as a search result? like, if under one Single Page Travel Guide I have two essential sections: #Attractions #Visa no chance to direct search queries for Visa directly to the Hashtag Link Section of #Visa? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Alternative links in the search results.
Hello, This is a short question Please look at this SERP screenshot: http://imgur.com/1EMen Who do they get the other links under their results. Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
301 redirects from old to new pages whit a lot of changes
Hello all, We are going to restyle and change CMS so all the urls will change. We are also updating content, adding much more content to the old pages trying to be more user and SEO friendly. My doubt is about doing 301 redirects from old to new pages when the content has changed a lot. Does it will mantain the ranking of the page or will crawlers thought that is a total diferent page. For example: one page new page will change from the old one the url, title, headers, meta description, content text and images. Should i maintain old content and do the CMS change with the 301 redirects and later change the content, that means a lot of work, or do it all at once? Thanks in advance Tomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomas.guemes0 -
How do I link a profile picture to my search results?
How do you get an icon which links to a google profile to display in google search results? Link this.... https://skitch.com/edwardrobertshaw/f12f8/central.ly-google-search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ed1234560