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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company. They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content. Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session. Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo). They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this. My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions. These are the things we've identified: All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now. Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
Technical SEO | | oline1230 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact. Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages. Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/
Technical SEO | | Blue-shark0 -
23,000 pages indexed, I think bad
Thank you Thank you Moz People!! I have a successful vacation rental company that has terrible seo but getting better. When I first ran Moz crawler and page grader, I had 35,000 errors and all f's.... tons of problem with duplicate page content and titles because not being consistent with page names... mainly capitalization and also rel canonical errors... with that said, I have now maybe 2 or 3 errors from time to time, but I fix every other day. Problem Maybe My site map shows in Google Webmaster submitted 1155
Technical SEO | | nickcargill
1541 indexed But google crawl shows 23,000 pages probably because of duplicate errors or possibly database driven url parameters... How bad is this and how do I get this to be accurate, I have seen google remove tool but I do not think this is right? 2) I have hired a full time content writer and I hope this works My site in google was just domain.com but I had put a 301 in to www.domain.com becauses www. had a page authority where the domain.com did not. But in webmasters I had domain.com just listed. So I changed that to www.domain.com (as preferred domain name) and ask for the first time to crawl. www.domain.com . Anybody see any problems with this? THank you MOZ people, Nick0 -
Differing numbers of pages indexed with and without the trailing slash
I noticed today that a site: query in Google (UK) for a certain domain I'm looking at returns different numbers depending on whether or not the trailing slash is added at the end. With the trailing slash the numbers are significantly different. This is a domain with a few duplicate content issues. It seems very rare but I've managed to replicate it for a couple of other well known domains, so this is the phenomenon I'm referring to: site:travelsupermarket.com - 16'300 results
Technical SEO | | ianmcintosh
site:travelsupermarket.com/ - 45'500 results site:guardian.co.uk - 120'000'000 results
site:guardian.co.uk/ - 121'000'000 results For the particular domain I'm looking at the numbers are 19'000 without the trailing slash and 800'000 with it! As mentioned, there are a few duplicate content issues at the moment that I'm trying to tidy up, but how should I interpret this? Has anyone seen this before and can advise what it could indicate? Thanks in advance for any answers.0 -
Google indexing thousands crazy search results with %25253
In GWT I started seeing very strange pages indexed a few weeks, and Google is no reporting over 21,000 of pages (blocked by robots.txt) with weird URLs like this: http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%2525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%2525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results The current robots.txt looks like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | BoulderJoe
Disallow: /wp-content Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /data
Disallow: /slideshows
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search This website is running an up to date WP install with Yoast's Google Analytics and SEO plug-in. I can't point to anything specific that happened with the site when these URLs started appearing even after I modified the robots.txt. What can be done to try and stop Google from creating and indexing these goofy URLs? I see lots of sites having this issue when I search in Google, but no one seems to have a solution.0 -
Same Video on Multiple Pages and Sites... Duplicate Issues?
We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)
Technical SEO | | SEOPA0