Google still listing old domain
-
Hi
We moved to a new domain back in March 2014 and redirected most pages with a 301 and submitted change of domain request through Google Webmaster tools. A couple of pages were left as 302 redirect as they had rubbish links pointing to them and we had previously had a penalty.
Google was still indexing the old domain and our rankings hadn't recovered. Last month we took away the 302 redirects and just did a blanket 301 approach from old domain to new in the the thinking that as the penalty had been lifted from the old domain there was no harm in sending everything to new domain.
Again, we submitted the change of domain in webmaster tools as the option was available to us but its been a couple of weeks now and the old domain is still indexed
Am I missing something? I realise that the rankings may not have recovered partly due to the disavowing / disregarding of several links but am concerned this may be contributing
-
Hi
I now have a robots.txt for the old site and I created a sitemap by replacing the current domain with the old one and uploaded.
Weirdly when I search for the non-www version of the old domain the pages indexed has increased!
According to WMT the Crawl postponed because robots.txt was inaccessible however I've checked it returns status 200 and the Robots.txt Tester says it's successful even though it never updates the timestamp.
-
Hi Marie
Many thanks for your response,
I've just looked in Webmater tools at the old domain and the option to change domains is there again but I also noticed when looking at the crawl errors there was a message along the lines of crawl postponed as robots.txt was inaccessible.
At the moment it's just a blanket redirect at IIS level so following your advice I'll re-establish the old site's robots.txt and a sitemap and see if Google crawls the 301's to the new domain.
In some ways I'm glad I haven't missed anything but would be nice if just the new domain indexed after all this time !
Thanks again
-
This is odd. The pages all seem to redirect from the old site to the new, so why is Google still indexing those old pages?
I can't see the robots.txt on the old site as it redirects, but is it possible that the robots.txt on fhr-net.co.uk is blocking Google? If this is the case, then Google probably wouldn't be able to see the old site and recognize the redirects.
It may also help to add a sitemap for the old site and also to ask Google to fetch and render the old site's pages and then submit them to the index. This should cause the 301's to be seen and processed by Google.
-
Even after all this time, there are still over 700 pages indexed on our old domain even though we have submitted the change of address twice in Webmaster tools, the second one being about 6 months ago if not longer
old domain is www.fhr-net.co.uk
Any advice would be appreciated
-
No worries,
I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question
-
I think that I'm so used to answering questions about penalized sites that I assumed that you had moved domains because of a penalty. My apologies!
Sounds like you've got the right idea.
-
Thanks for responses,
One week on and since submitting the second change of domain in GWT we've seen the number of pages indexed for the old domain drop from over 1300 to around 700 this week which is something
Regarding the redirect debate, it's an interesting read thanks for sending that. Isn't the situation the same as a site that didn't have a penalty in that you should be monitoring your backlink profile and reconfiguring or disavowing links outside the guidelines whilst carrying out activities that will naturally build decent links and therefore redress the balance?
-
This doesn't answer your question, but I just wanted to point out that the 301 or 302 redirects are not a good idea. Even if you got the penalty lifted, there still can be unnatural links there that can harm you in the eyes of the Penguin algorithm. A 301 will redirect those bad links to the new site. A 302, if left in place long enough will do the same.
Here's an article I wrote today that goes into greater detail:
-
Oh, it may be that it's the other way around with canonical URL-s. At least according to Google (here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033086?hl=en
- _Each destination URL should have a self-referencing rel="canonical" meta tag. _
-
Hmm.. certainly someone with more experience than myself would have a more elegant solution, but I would still try to do this by establishing the canonical URL because you don't want to delist: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066#6
If you can configure your server, you can use
rel="canonical"
HTTP headers to indicate the canonical URL for HTML documents and other files such as PDFs. Say your site makes the same PDF available via different URLs (for example, for tracking purposes), like this:_http://www.example.com/downloads/white-paper.pdf http://www.example.com/downloads/partner-1/white-paper.pdf http://www.example.com/downloads/partner-2/white-paper.pdf http://www.example.com/downloads/partner-3/white-paper.pdf_
In this case, you can use a
rel="canonical"
HTTP header to specify to Google the canonical URL for the PDF file, as follows:Link: <http: www.example.com="" downloads="" white-paper.pdf="">; rel="canonical"</http:>
-
Hi there
The old pages don't exist any more to add the canonical they're 301's from old domain to new but over 1000 pages show up for site:www.fhr-net.co.uk
-
Got it, you must have tried adding the canonical URL meta tags already, right? If not, check out: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
"...in late 2009, Google announced support for cross-domain use of rel=canonical. This is typically for syndicated content, when you’re concerned about duplication and only want one version of the content to be eligible for ranking...
..First off, Google may choose to ignore cross-domain use of rel=canonical if the pages seem too different or it appears manipulative. The ideal use of cross-domain rel=canonical would be a situation where multiple sites owned by the same entity share content, and that content is useful to the users of each individual site. In that case, you probably wouldn’t want to use 301-redirects (it could confuse users and harm the individual brands), but you may want to avoid duplicate content issues and control which property Google displays in search results. I would not typically use rel=canonical cross-domain just to consolidate PageRank..."
-
Thanks for your reply,
It's not that I want to de-list the old domain as I would rather people get to the site using that domain than not at all but, my concern is that for whatever reason the transfer hasn't completed as it's been such a long time and we're for instance not getting the full benefit of sites linking to the old domain passed to the new one
-
If your goal is to delist the old domain I am going to copy the answer I just gave at http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-exclude-all-pages-on-a-subdomain-for-search, simply because it's clear and works quickly (48h) in my experience.
This is the authoritative way that Google recommends at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en&rd=1:
- Add an robots.txt file for your domain. Usually via FTP. Add the "noindex" meta-tags to every page as well.
- Add your subdomain as a separate site in Google Webmaster Tools
- On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, click Google Index on the left-hand menu.
- Click Remove URLs.
- Click New removal request.
- Type the URL of the page you want removed from search results (not the Google search results URL or cached page URL), and then click Continue. How to find the right URL. The URL is case-sensitive—use exactly the same characters and capitalization that the site uses.
- Click Yes, remove this page.
- Click Submit Request.
To exclude the entire domain, simply enter the domain URL (e.g. http://domain.com) at the 7th step.
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
-
Why do SEO agencies ask for access to our Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager?
What do they need GTM for? And what is the use case for setting up Google Search Console?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NBJ_SM0 -
301 Redirect Only Home Page/Root Domain via Domain Registrar Only
Hi All, I am really concerned about doing a 301 redirect. This is my situation: Both Current and New Domain is registered with a local domain registrar (similar to GoDaddy but a local version) Current Domain: Servers are pointing to Wix servers and the website is built and hosted with Wix I would like to do a 301 redirect but would like to do it in the following way with a couple of factors to keep in mind: 99% of my link are only pointed to the home page/root domain only. Not to subdirectories. New Domain: I will register this with wix with a new plan but keep the exact sitemap and composition of current website and launch with new domain. Current Domain: I want to change server pointing to wix to point to local domain registrar servers. Then do a 301 redirect for only the home page/root domain to point to the new domain listed with wix. So 301 is done via local registrar and not via Wix. Another point to mention is it will also change from Http to Https as well as a name change. Your comments on the above will be greatly appreciated and as to whether there is risk in trying to do a 301 redirect as above. Doing it as above it also cheaper if I do the 301 via the wix platform I will need to register a full new premium plan and run it concurrently to the old plan whereas if I do it as mentioned above will only have the additional domain annual fee. Look forward to your comments. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Google + under Google business domain email account
Hello there, I have a quick and straight question and I am hoping to find answer here. What do we do with a G+ profile that was set up through a business domain's email account that is used by more than one person? We want to use the company name, but we can't as it is considered personal email account although it is under business domain verified by Google. Is there a way that we ask Google to change it and allow us to use the name of the company or should we just deactivate it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | montauto0 -
Target keyword still in domain name?
Target keyword still in domain name? getting domain name same as keyword still work for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google places: 7 weeks and still not verified. Reasons?
I've created Google Places entries for the business' 25 locations in 8 countries. It's been 7 weeks and Google hasn't validated my bulk upload yet. Which of the following would you say might do the trick? URL: I have pointed to http://site.com/country/city for every location. Should I point to http://site? I've created categories in English, but being this about local I guess I should do it in the local language of each country... Should I cancel the bulk upload and do one country per country? My list of countries include Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia so I don't know if manual verification is done by google centrally and that might be a problem. Otherwise the entries are (IMHO) well written, detailed and all. But I'm kind of desperate now because it's 7 weeks already... thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TIBA0 -
Google Places / Google Analytics
I apologize first if this comes across as extremely novice, but I realized I really didn't know the answer and so - here I am. 🙂 Is anyone familiar with tracking google place traffic in google analytics? Is it possible? I'd love to know how many of our visitors are coming from our google place listings (we have several locations throughout the state.) Much gratitude in advance ~ Alicia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aaronetics0