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
-
I have redirected my old domain to my new blog, why its not being detected?
Hey Experts, I hope you are all doing great, I'm extremely confused right now. Any help will be much appreciated. I have redirected my old blog hellgatelondon.com to my new blog iriveramerica.com. It has been redirected for many days with wild card from bluehost and also within htaccess but Moz link explorer won't detect it, what's the problem? anyone please? Kind regards...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | euaobela0 -
Localized Domain Issue - Can I use Search Console to solve this?
Struggling through trying to resolve a complicated search issue - would appreciate any community input or suggestions. The Background Info We have several brand sites and each one has both a .ca and .com domain. For some reason, our website platform was created in a way that hundreds of pages on the .com domain have an equivalent page on the .ca domain, which are all 301'ed to the appropriate .com pages. Example below for clarity: www.domain.ca/gadget/brand - 301 Redirected to: www.domain.com/gadget/brand www.domain.ca/gadget/en/brandcanada = Proper .ca Canadian URL (where en is the language - fr exists as well) The Problem Because these .com pages exist under the .ca domain as well, they have started to outrank the correct .ca pages on Google. This has led to Canadian customers finding incorrect information, pricing, and reviews for these products - causing all sorts of customer service issues and therefore affecting our sales. I am being told that to properly fix the issue, and remove the incorrect URLs under the .ca domain would be prohibitively expensive in terms of resources, so I'm left trying to fix this via means available to me (i.e. anything but a change to how the platform is currently setup). The Attempted Fix I've submitted proper sitemaps for the .ca brand sites, and we have also created a robots.txt file to be accessed only when the site is crawled through the .ca domain. In that robots.txt, we have Disallowed crawling of any /gadget/brand/ URLs for the .ca domain. This was done a week ago and I am still seeing the .com URL show up in search results. The Question Should I be submitting any www.brand.ca/gadget/brand/ URLs to be temporarily removed from Google? Because of the 301 redirect in place from www.brand.ca/gadget/brand to www.brand.com/gadget/brand, I am hesitant to do so, as I do not want the .com URL removed. Will Google simply remove the .ca URL and not follow the 301 redirect to remove that URL as well? Any additional insight or feedback would be awesome as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trevor-O0 -
Canonical URL on search result pages
Hi there, Our company sells educational videos to Nurses via subscription. I've been looking at their video search results page:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9868john
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd When you click on a category, the URL appears like this:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=Medications Would this be an instance where i'd use the canonical tag to redirect each search results page? Bearing in mind the /cpd page is under /Nursing cpd, and that /Nursing cpd is our best performing page in search engines, would it be better to refer it to the 'Nursing CPD' rather than 'CPD' page? Any advice is very welcome,
Thanks,
John0 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
What to do when Demoted Sitelinks appear on search results under my main link?
Hello all, I had some links that i didn't want them to appear under search results (under my main domain) . Using websmaster 'sitelinks' i demoted those links and it has been almost a month and i can see those unwanted links on SERPS. Those pages don't even have high traffic, I am not quite sure why even they appear on Google. Is there anything else i can do to remove them under main domain search results. Thanks Seda
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
Page indexed but not showing up at all in search results
I am currently working on the SEO for a roofing company. I have developed GEO targeted pages for both commercial and residential roofing (as well as attic insulation and gutters) and have hundreds of 1st page placements for the GEO targeted keywords. What is baffling me is that they are performing EXTREMELY poorly on the bigger cities, to the point of not evening showing up in the first 5 pages. I also target a page specifically for roof repair in Phoenix and it is not coming up AT ALL. This is not typically the results I get when directly targeting keywords. I'm working on implementing keyword variations as well as adding about 10 or so information pages (@ 700 words) regarding different roofing systems which I plan to cross link on the site, etc. I'm just wondering if there is a simple answer as to why the pages I want to be showing up the most are performing so poorly and what I would need to do to improve their rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dogstarweb0 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0