DNS Settings went wrong....
-
Hi,
I'm going to have to give you a little bit of a back story here...
In July last year we launched a brand new website, www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk. It was on a new domain.
The IT department set it live, and unfortunately messed up the DNS settings so that the site was launched under the wrong domain, smartloan.co.uk.
This error was rectified within hours.
Unfortunately in those few hours, Google indexed it!
I then had to set up webmaster tools for both domains, so I could use the 'remove URLs' tool in there, to remove all the URLs from the smartloan domain.
That all worked fine, the Landlords site was probably set back a bit, but we're now achieving some quite good results for it.
2 weeks ago we launched Smartloan as a product, and of course launched the website we've been working on for months...
You guessed it! Google is now looking for all those old Landlords pages under Smartloan.
My first thought is that we should do 301s. Would that be the best course of action, do you think? Webmaster tools has found 25 of them so far, but I know there are more - the Landlords site launched with about 90 pages...
And where should I send the 301's? To the Landlords site, or to the smartloan root?
Is there anything else I should do?
Thanks for your help!
Amelia
-
Thank you again, Scott!
-
You can safely mark them as "fixed" since there is no other website linking to those pages. They aren't actually broken links.
Don't worry about doing a 'change of address' now.
If you feel my answer is appropriate, please select "Good Answer".
Thanks.
Scott O. -
Thanks for replying Scott!
In webmaster tools there are 25 crawl errors. These are all pages that never actually existed on that site. Like I say the IT department messed up the DNS when they set our landlords site live - all the landlords pages were listed under the smartloan domain.
I haven't marked them as 'fixed' yet because I haven't actually fixed them (yet)!
Landlords does not reference smartloan at all - and vice versa. They are completely separate businesses (though owned by the same holding company).
I haven't done a change of address - maybe I should have done this back in July 2012 when this problem first happened?? All I did then was to noindex the urls in smartloan's robots.txt, then in WMT I did the remove urls thing, which worked back in July.
What is concerning me is whether this will affect smartloan - as a business it will pretty much depend on natural search visits, and won't survive without it...
Thank you again for replying and for your reassurance that it probably isn't something to worry about - my developer says the same thing, so maybe I'll just let sleeping dogs lie and hope for the best!
Have a great evening (or morning/afternoon if you're in a different time zone!!!)
Amelia
-
Amelia
When you say: "Google is now looking for all those old Landlords pages under Smartloan." Do you mean in GWT you are seeing broken links reported?
After marking those URLs ask "fixed" in GWT, do they come back again as broken links a week or so later?
Are there any references to the smartloan site from the landlord site that are not supposed to be there?
Did you do a "Change of Address" in GWT or just request to block certain URLs? If you did a Change of Address, you might want to check to see if that is still in your GWT settings and remove it.
Otherwise, I imagine after a few weeks, the GWT will just clear up naturally by itself. It probably is not an issue to be concerned about.
Scott O.
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
-
Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong? Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PSOM1010 -
Should I set a max crawl rate in Webmaster Tools?
We have a website with around 5,000 pages and for the past few months we've had our crawl rate set to maximum (we'd just started paying for a top of the range dedicated server at the time, so performance wasn't an issue). Google Webmaster Tools has alerted me this morning that the crawl rate has expired so I'd have to manually set the rate again. In terms of SEO, is having a max rate a good thing? I found this post on Moz, but it's dated from 2008. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur0 -
Website penalised can't find where the problem is. Google went INSANE
Hello, I desperately need a hand here! Firstly I just want to say that I we never infracted google guidelines as far as we know. I have been around in this field for about 6 years and have had success with many websites on the way relying only in natural SEO and was never penalised until now. The problem is that our website www.turbosconto.it is and we have no idea why. (not manual) The web has been online for more than 6 months and it NEVER started to rank. it has about 2 organic visits a day at max. In this time we got several links from good websites which are related to our topic which actually keep sending us about 50 visits a day. Nevertheless our organic visita are still 1 or 2 a day. All the pages seem to be heavily penalised ... when you perform a search for any of our "shops"even including our Url, no entries for the domain appear. A search example: http://www.turbosconto.it zalando What I will expect to find as a result: http://www.turbosconto.it/buono-sconto-zalando The same case repeats for all of the pages for the "shops" we promote. Searching any of the brads + our domain shows no result except from "nike" and "euroclinix" (I see no relationship between these 2) Some days before for these same type of searches it was showing pages from the domain which we blocked by robots months ago, and which go to 404 error instead of our optimised landing pages which cannot be found in the first 50 results. These pages are generated by our rating system... We already send requests to de index all theses pages but they keep appearing for every new page that we create. And the real pages nowhere to be found... Here isan example: http://www.turbosconto.it/shops/codice-promozionale-pimkie/rat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch
You can see how google indexes that for as in this search: site:www.turbosconto.it rate Why on earth will google show a page which is blocked by the robots.txt displaying that the content cannot retrieved because it is blocked by the robots instead of showing pages which are totally SEO Friendly and content rich... All the script from TurboSconto is the same one that we use in our spanish version www.turbocupones.com. With this last one we have awesome results, so it makes things even more weird... Ok apart from those weird issues with the indexation and the robots, why did a research on out backlinks and we where surprised to fin a few bad links that we never asked for. Never the less there are just a few and we have many HIGH QUALITY LINKS, which makes it hard to believe that this could be the reason. Just to be sure we, we used the disavow tool for these links, here are the bad links we submitted 2 days ago: domain: www.drilldown.it #we did not ask for this domain: www.indicizza.net #we did not ask for this domain: urlbook.in #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://inpe.br.way2seo.org/domain-list-878 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://shady.nu.gomarathi.com/domain-list-789 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://www.clicdopoclic.it/2013/12/i-migliori-siti-italiani-di-coupon-e.html #we did not ask for this, moreover and is a copy of a post of an other blog http://typo.domain.bi/turbosconto.it I have no clue what can it be, we have no warning messages in the webmaster tools or anything.
For me it looks as if google has a BUG and went crazy on judging our italian website. Or perhaps we are just missing something ??? If anyone could throw some light on this I will be really glad and willing to pay some compensation for the help provided. THANKS A LOT!0 -
Where are we going wrong?
I've been going over all the top ranking factors, running my site through Moz analytics and page graders, just researching the heck out of this, and I'm trying to figure out where we're going wrong. The site is www.imageworkscreative.com - and we're being outranked by newer sites. We need to rank for terms like web design va, custom web design, web design firm, etc. We publish blog updates on average once a week, and promote those via social media and a few syndication services. We were using a link builder who wasn't following our instructions regarding competitor backlinks ... pretty sure her work ended up hurting more than it helped. I'd like to hire a consultant or high-quality link builder to help get things going, for us and for our clients. Any recommendations would be much appreciated, as well as any advice for us in terms of overall issues that need to be resolved. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Wrong page in serps
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niclaus78
I've been working with a law firm's website for a couple of years and we've encounter a problem. The pages were divided to target employers and employees separately. For the very targeted keywords mentioning either employees or employers everything was good but for broader less targeted keywords e.g unfair dismissal keywords chooses either one or the other which is a problem. Now I created this ''bridge'' pages where all the topics are explained and then users are directed to and then they will chose where to go. the problem is a lot of off page was created during this years either targeting on or the other. What I plan to do is: -Create a new site map and changing the priority, so the new pages will have a priority 1 and the others less. - bookmarks, articles, etc will be targeting now to the new pages. I place the new pages linked from the home page so that they get the link juice of the home page and they are also now more a category page in the map, so a level up comparing to the previous ones. Questions: 1- Is it worthwhile adding a rel canonical tag to the new pages and rel alternate to previous pages, or if its not a question of duplicate content it shouldn't have an impact? What other things should I take into consideration? Thanks a lot. nico0 -
Any ideas, what i'm doing wrong?
Hi, I have done alot of work over the past few weeks to fix errors but I seem to be slding down the rankings again! I have attached a screenshot of the competitive link analysis. The 2nd competitor along is pushing past me and I just can't see why. What steps should I take and what is the priority? Thanks, T23 auAMrVT.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tekton230 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Parameters when deciding how to set up cross domain analytics?
Hi, I am planning on setting up cross domain analytics for my website. I have found lots of sources about the code to use, but haven't been able to find something about what parameters to consider. Would appreciate my fellow mozzers helping me to put together a list of all the variations of elements I may want to track to ensure I am setting it up correctly. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0