Old Redirecting Website Still Showing In SERPs
-
I have a client, a plumber, who bought another plumbing company (and that company's domain) at one point. This other company was very old and has a lot of name recognition so they created a dedicated page to this other company within their main website, and redirected the other company's old domain to that page.
This has worked fine, in that this page on the main site is now #1 when you search for the other old company's name. But for some reason the old domain comes up #2 (despite the fact that it's redirecting). Now, I could understand if the redirect had only been set up recently, but I'm reasonably sure this happened about a year ago. Could it be due to the fact that there are many sites out there still linking to that old domain?
Thanks in advance!
-
@Simon agreed - could be a 302 & check WMT
Also, it may not be a bad thing having results in position #1 & #2 in the SERPs Means your client has listings in the best positions
Another option could be to use a rel=canonical to wipe the site out very quickly - see Rand's example of how he removed his old blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday (generally, be extremely cautious with this approach but given your goals , i.e. remove site from index, it should be fine)
-
Hi there,
Maybe, it's likely that there are enough inbound links to the old domain, however it is worth checking whether the Domain Redirect that's in place is a 301 or a 302. If it's the later, get it changed to a 301 if you can.
Depending on your access to Google Webmaster Tools, it would be worth informing Google via GWT (if you can) of the change of address (domain) for the old site. This would help to speed up the full reindexing and removal of the old domain from Google's index.
Hope that helps,
Regards, Simon
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
-
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
New Site Launch - Redirecting Hundreds of Old Invalid URLs?
We have a client whose WMT shows a ton of "Not found" crawl errors after a new site launched. The URLs are largely a bunch of files that they had previously uploaded on their old site which have external links pointing at them. What is their best course of action, if they don't have files on the new site that correspond with these old files? Redirect to the home page? Leave them 404ing? Customize 404 message? (Note: They're mostly generic, non-human friendly URLs that are difficult to identify like /gallery3.php/ppage/3, g/interior.php/pid/3/sid/24, /uploads/1213196781.pdf)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Effect Of Restoring Old Website After Implementing 301 Redirects
After redesigning my old Drupal website and launching a new "improved" Wordpress version the new version is performing badly. Ranking is poor and conversions don't occur. I realize that my new design is bad (no call to action, poor structure, text heavy). New business inquiries have ceased. The site contains 450 pages. After spending $25,000 and a year of my life I see the new version is not an improvement! What would be the effect of reinstating the old version of the site and doing 301 redirects back to it? Would the old rankings be restored? I need to decide whether I should revert or focus on fixing flaws in the improved design. Any thoughts?? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
API to power all websites
I spoke to one of my lead web developers and we are planning on powering all of our desktop, mobile and tablet sites with our new API. Everything will be populated through javascript and is cloud-based rather than through actual HTML. How do we incorporate all of our SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code?
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code? http://naturespremiumpestdefense.com/ Thanks, Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ULTRASEM0 -
Blog posts not showing in serps for exact match title search
hi- my first client ranks #1 for the exact phrase of each blog post title the 2nd client doesnt rank anywhere when i search for the exact post title 2nd client has robots.txt User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro9
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ so that shouldnt noindex any posts right? his site ranks for many kw's - but oddly none of his blog posts are anywhere to be found - i dont mean for a kw search - i mean for searching for the entire title he doesnt rank anywhere in first 5 pages for any of 6-7 posts i checked any idea what could cause this? thanks0 -
Optimising a Dynamic website ?
A client has bought the Nostalgia wp theme. I've installed Yoast but because the website is ajax based and the content for the pages are dynamically loaded the plugin won't work. Or at least not to my knowledge? The developer doesn't currently have a solution, which from previous expereience it will never be supported. So I need some possible solutions here. Create a mobile site? Cons more time, more money etc Create non dynamic pages linked in footer area. Cons page duplication etc. It's a small niche so having the basic elements is imperative to getting it ranking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StephenForde0 -
Redirecting multiple websites to a single website
I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand. My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time? I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain. Thanks! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daenterpri0