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 get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Shall I change duplicated product descriptions if I am top ranking result and was first to publish it?
about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites). The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well. Which of the following options would you opt for? keeping the description and just adding some unique content replacing the complete product description by a new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
301 Redirect? How to leverage the traffic on our old domain.
I've seen multiple questions about this but there's a few different answers on ways to approach it. Figured I'd personally ask for our situation. Any advice would be appreciated. We formed a new company with a new name / domain while at the same time buying an existing company in our industry. The domain and site of the company we acquired is ranking for some valuable keywords and still getting a significant amount of traffic (about half of what our new site is getting). A big downside has been, when they moved that site to a different server, something happened to where the site became uneducable so it's full of bad pricing and information. Because of that, we've had a maintenance page up for a little bit because it was generating calls to our sales team (GOOD) but the customer was having seen incredibly incorrect information (BAD) Rather than correcting those issues or figuring out why the site is un-editable, we just want to find a way where we can leverage that traffic and have them end up at our new site. Would we 301 redirect the entire domain to our new one? If we did that would the old domain still keep the majority of it's page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HuskyCargo1 -
Something unintelligible in google search results.
In the last month i see something that i can't explain, from nowhere the first search result for the keyword Name Necklace is an Etsy shop, (I attach an image). I try to find out why google gives this online shop the first position and i have no idea why is that. Please, any suggestions? mnbAIrY.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0 -
Top Google News Result = Search Result #11 (first on second page)
Hey all, I've noticed that, in most cases, when we have an article that gets the top spot in Google News results for a given keyword, the search result for that same article will appear in position #11 (the first result on the second page for standard SERP viewing). This is nearly always the case, which suggests its built into Google's algorithm to prevent overlap. Has anyone else experienced this? I haven't seen it discussed previously on Moz or other SEO forums, but it makes sense. Or if you haven't experienced this, I'd love to hear about what you're seeing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dangaul0