Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after
-
Hi all,
Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net.
We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book:
- Individual 301 redirects for all the pages.
- Change of address via the GWT.
- Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy.
4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000
The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects).
And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain!
Something is not right here, but I have no explanation why these pages still exist.
Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!
-
Thanks Dana. Honestly, we have a lot of experience dealing with site migrations - I read dozens of posts and we've implemented our own step-by=step guidelines for successful site migration.
As you can see, sometimes even when you do everything by the book you can encounter some unexpected issues.
-
Yes I have. I could see the 301 redirects correctly and without any further issues.
-
Yes, it sounds like perhaps there is a technical issue here. I like Keri's suggestion below. Also, have you grepped your server logs to see if Googlebot is having issues?
It can taken Google a long long time to take down search results to old pages that either don't exist any more or that 301 to a new page. You may have to resort to using the removal tool. I realize that for 2,000 URLs doing these one at a time is inconvenient, but it may just be what you have to do.
I have some old notes on domain migration that I'll try to dig up, but unfortunately I don't think there's much there that's helpful after the fact. But I'll see what I can find.
-
the URL remover tool would be one of my last options, since I too would be afraid of any authority vanishing with the old link.
Google must have some reason to continue to index the pages and I wouldn't want them removed until I'm positive I gained back all the authority I could, from these old pages.
-
Are you certain the 301 redirects are active and working?
-
Can you add canonical tags to the 301'ed pages?
-
Make sure that none of the URLs in the 301 URL chain are disallowed by a robots.txt file. If they were in the redirect chain, Google would not be able to properly crawl the new page and properly index.
That last point may be what's preventing a portion of the old URLs from dropping, if they are being blocked in the robots.txt file.
-
-
What happens when you go into GWT and fetch fancydiamonds.net as googlebot? Is there some reason that perhaps googlebot isn't seeing the redirects correctly?
-
Hi David,
see my answer to RaymondPP.
Also, what do you mean by saying "you are linking out to your other site"?
Did you see anything?
-
There is a perfect correlation between the organic drop and the revenue – It has decreased dramatically. Of course I checked for Analytics issue but all the other traffic sources have stayed the same. We have big PPC campaigns and the traffic data is correct.
About management of expectations – usually we say that we expect 3-4 months of traffic droppings, but this had taken us a bit by surprise.
-
Thanks for the answer.
That's always a possibility - the problem is that these url's have not too few links (the old homepage is still indexed!).
If I'll use the url remover won't this result in losing all the link juice for those url's?
-
I agree with both of the previous suggestions and thought I would add a comment and a question too.
Seeing a decline of 50% or even more in traffic after a site migration is not uncommon. Hopefully your clients went into the migration with eyes open, knowing that they could see significantly lower traffic for anywhere from 6 weeks to a year, and maybe never fully recover. This sometimes happens. That's why the planning process is so important (and management of expectations).
That being said, when you installed Google Analytics on the new site, did anything change in your GA tracking code? Sometimes this happens and can lead to old analytics reports and new analytics reports not being an "apples to apples" comparison. It's just a thought. It could be that the traffic isn't actually 50% lower, but has changed much less than that.
Has revenue (or whatever your conversion goal is) dropped, increased or stayed the same?
-
I'm not understanding why your traffic is lower. If you have 301 redirects in place, even if your old pages show up and someone clicks the link, it will take them to the new site.
Another option you could pursue is a 410 (gone) for your old pages. This states to Google that the page has been removed and should no longer be indexed or linked.
But beware, you are linking out to your other site.
The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404.
-
Hi skifr - Have you tried using the URL remover tool in GWT? And if you really want those pages out of the search engine, how about a noindex tag 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 to deal with Pages not present anymore in the site
Hi, we need to cut out from the catalog some destinations for our tour operator, so basically we need to deal with destination pages and tour pages not present anymore on the site. What do you think is the best approach to deal with this pages to not loose ranking? Do you think is a good approach to redirect with 301's these pages to the home page or to the general catalog page or do you suggest another approach? tx for your help!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
Google not indexing /showing my site in search results...
Hi there, I know there are answers all over the web to this type of question (and in Webmaster tools) however, I think I have a specific problem that I can't really find an answer to online. site is: www.lizlinkleter.com Firstly, the site has been live for over 2 weeks... I have done everything from adding analytics, to submitting a sitemap, to adding to webmaster tools, to fetching each individual page as googlebot and then submitting to index via webmaster tools. I've checked my robot files and code elsewhere on the site and the site is not blocking search engines (as far as I can see) There are no security issues in webmaster tools or MOZ. Google says it has indexed 31 pages in the 'Index Status' section, but on the site dashboard it says only 2 URLS are indexed. When I do a site:www.lizlinketer.com search the only results I get are pages that are excluded in the robots file: /xmlrpc.php & /admin-ajax.php. Now, here's where I think the issue stems from - I developed the site myself for my wife and I am new to doing this, so I developed it on the live URL (I now know this was silly) - I did block the content from search engines and have the site passworded, but I think Google must have crawled the site before I did this - the issue with this was that I had pulled in the Wordpress theme's dummy content to make the site easier to build - so lots of nasty dupe content. The site took me a couple of months to construct (working on it on and off) and I eventually pushed it live and submitted to Analytics and webmaster tools (obviously it was all original content at this stage)... But this is where I made another mistake - I submitted an old site map that had quite a few old dummy content URLs in there... I corrected this almost immediately, but it probably did not look good to Google... My guess is that Google is punishing me for having the dummy content on the site when it first went live - fair enough - I was stupid - but how can I get it to index the real site?! My question is, with no tech issues to clear up (I can't resubmit site through webmaster tools) how can I get Google to take notice of the site and have it show up in search results? Your help would be massively appreciated! Regards, Fraser
Technical SEO | | valdarama0 -
Why would GWT say 0 pages indexed ?
Hi Looking in GWT > Google Index > Index Status says 0 pages indexed Yes if i search manually on google for brand site is listed, and i see organic traffic from Google in analytics I take it this is likely an error in GWT and nothing to worry about ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Some pages on my site are not linked - should I add a Visual SiteMap?
Hello, I have a site that does not have a blog feed.
Technical SEO | | NikitaG
And unless it is done Manually there is no way to see the blog links.
www.MigrationLawyers.co.za Now, I submit the the Sitemap to google, but will it be a good Idea to include an actual sitemap of the site (for example in the footer of the site)
http://migrationlawyers.co.za/sitemap-immigration-south-africa and should i Make the "sitemap" link a follow or nofollow? Thanks so much in advance
Nikita0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Drastic increase of indexed pages correlated to rankings loss?
Our ecommerce website has had a drastic increase in indexed pages, and equal loss of Google organic traffic. After 10/1 the number of indexed pages jumped from 240k to 5.7 million by the end of the year, according to GWT. Coincidentally, the sitemap tops at 14,192 pages, with 13,324 indexed. Organic traffic on some top keyphrases began declining by half after 10/26 and ranking (previously placing in the top 5 spots) has dropped to the fifth page of results. This website does produce session id's (/c=) so we been blocking /c=/ in the robots.txt file. We also have a rel=canonical on all pages pointing at the correct url. With all of this in place, traffic hasn't recovered. Is there a correlation between this spike of indexed pages and the lost keyword ranking? Any advice to investigate and correct this further would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | marketing_zoovy.com0 -
Development site accidentally got indexed and now appears in SERPs. How to fix?
I work at a design firm, and we just redesigned a website for a client. When it came time for the coding, we initially built a development site to work out all the kinks before going live. Then we relaunched the actual site about a week ago. Here's the problem: Somehow, the developer who coded the site for us (a freelancer) allowed the development site to be indexed by Google. Now, when you enter the client's name into Google, the development site appears higher in the results pages than the real site! In fact, the real site isn't even in the top 50 search results. The client is understandably angry about this for multiple reasons. We quickly added a robots.txt file to the development site and a 301 redirect to the real site. However, that did seemed to have no effect on the problem. Any ideas on how to fix this mess? Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | matt-145670