Website not being indexed after relocation

[collectedrunning]

I have a scenario where a 'draft' website was built using Google Sites, and published using a Google Sites sub domain. Consequently, the 'same' website was rebuilt and published on its own domain.

So effectively there were two sites, both more or less identical, with identical content.

The first website was thoroughly indexed by Google.

The second website has not been indexed at all - I am assuming for the obvious reasons ie. that Google is viewing it as an obvious rip-off of the first site / duplicate content etc.

I was reluctant to take down the first website until I had found an effective way to resolve this issue long-term => ensuring that in future Google would index the second 'proper' site.

A permanent 301 redirect was put forward as a solution - however, believe it or not, the Google Sites platform has no facility for implementing this.

For lack of an alternative solution I have gone ahead and taken down the first site. I understand that this may take some time to drop out of Google's index, however, and I am merely hoping that eventually the second site will be picked up in the index.

I would sincerely appreciate an advice or recommendations on the best course of action - if any! - I can take from here.

Many thanks!

Matt.

[MikeTek]

Nice catch, Lynn. That's got to be (at least the majority of) the problem.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Matt,

It looks like you have no index headers being sent out on your site. if you have the web developers toolbar installed on firefox and view the response headers on your homepage you will see:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, nosnippet

So this is like a noindex, no follow meta tag and is basically blocking the search engines from spidering and indexing your site. If you find out where those headers are getting set and get rid of them you should see your site getting indexed pretty quickly.

[MikeTek]

Hi Matt,

Majestic, Open Site Explorer and ahrefs are all showing zero links pointing to the entire domain, waydownunder.com.au.

I'm not suggesting this proves that you don't have enough links for Google to crawl/index the site, as I have also repeatedly seen Google index sites that don't have links yet. However, if these three major link indexes are showing zero links, there's a good chance Google's not discovering the site through regularly crawling as well.

Have you tried creating and submitting a sitemap via Webmaster Tools?

Best,
Mike

[collectedrunning]

Thanks Lynn and Mike - really appreciate your feedback. What you've both said about duplicate content being a ranking rather than indexing issue certainly makes sense.

Unfortunately the old site is unable to be restored. On the other hand, regular links have been posted to the site through social media (facebook) as well as a blog site (which IS being indexed regularly).

So - this has me entirely stumped!!!! I just cannot see any reason why the site is not being indexed at all! The site has been live now for around 2 -3 months; and I've had other sites with far less content / active links etc etc being indexed in no time at all.

The website in question is www.waydownunder.com.au - if anyone had a minute to take a quick look and see if I've missed anything obvious, I would really really appreciate it.

Thanks kindly,

Matt.

[MikeTek]

Hi Matt,

I would echo Lynn's recommendations here.

I doubt Google is actively filtering the 2nd site from search results (the duplicate content filter is employed scarcely, you'll find no shortage of duplicated sites that are indexed - it's also more of a results filter than an index filter, meaning duplicate content is still indexed, it just isn't shown in SERPs when the filter is active).

It's more likely that you simply haven't sent Google a strong enough ping that the site is worth indexing. Generate some marketing activity around the site, link to it from the current site as Lynn suggested (esp. with turning those pages into summaries), and I expect the site will show up in the index within a couple of weeks.

Best of Luck,
Mike

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Matt,

It can take some time to index new sites. Submitting a sitemap to GWT, building a couple of links and sharing it a bit on social channels will usually help speed up the process. I am not very familiar with google sites, but if you can re-enable the google hosted site then maybe it is an idea to announce there that the site is now hosted elsewhere and link to it. You could reduce the content on the google site pages to just an abstract/intro on each page and link to the full content which is now on the new site which should take care of duplicate content issues and also show a clear connection between the two of them (for both incoming users and search engines).