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
-
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Site still indexed after request 'change of address' search console
Hello, A couple of weeks ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
Search queries results Wrong
Hey there, My website shows Wrong Search Queries in Google Search Console, Also Shows URLS which are not there in my website, Which Shows in crawl Errors. here i have attached Screenshot . http://prntscr.com/egzl88 Please Help me out how i can Deindex This type of URLs From Google index, & make My main pages crawl First in Google Search. because of this my website Ranking Also lost, Please any Expert can help out.. Thanx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pooja.verify030 -
Proper 301 in Place but Old Site Still Indexed In Google
So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today. The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
How to get google to categorize a website in search results?
Hello everyone and thanks in advance for your time. I have a good understanding about SEO, backlinks etc but nowhere near to professional! A good friend of mine has an online store made with opencart e commerce platform he would like to have have category view when his company name is searched on google. Does anyone has any idea how can this be achieved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superofelia0 -
To index search results or to not index search results?
What are your feelings about indexing search results? I know big brands can get away with it (yelp, ebay, etc). Apart from UGC, it seems like one of the best ways to capture long tail traffic at scale. If the search results offer valuable / engaging content, would you give it a go?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Places Listing in Search Results
Hi everyone, We have a company that hired us to set-up their Google Places listing for their 2nd location. The listing for the 1st location is very strong. Lots of reviews, Zagat rating, Knowledge graph, etc. In the search results the Google Places listing for the 1st location has merged with the website listing. You can see the link to the main site w/ a small grey google places listing directly below it. The client would like BOTH Google places listing to show up in the search results. They both show up on the map listing but not in the search results. Each location has its own listing in Google Places. We have also created different pages on the website for each location. Is there a way to get the search results to display places listings? I have noticed a few other business have done it by naming each of their multiple locations something slightly different. Then the search results seem to realize there are multiple locations and display the places listing in the search results. Anyone run into this? Any ideas? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
To index search results or not?
In its webmaster guidelines, Google says not to index search results " that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." I've noticed several big brands index search results, and am wondering if it is generally OK to index search results with high engagement metrics (high PVPV, time on site, etc). We have an database of content, and it seems one of the best ways to get this content in search engines would be to allow indexing of search results (to capture the long tail) rather than build thousands of static URLs. Have any smaller brands had success with allowing indexing of search results? Any best practices or recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0