Sitelink Trouble - CMS Migration
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Hi Mozzers,
My company recently took over a website for a client and moved them onto our CMS. We are having some issues right now with sitelinks.
A few things have happened to cause this:
1. Our IT department didn't put in the proper 301 redirects from their old subdirectory pages to the new corresponding subdirectory pages. (Insert head smack here.)
2. In addition to taking over the client's desktop domain, we've also taken over the client's mobile site. The mobile site has changed from m.domain.com to www.domain.mobi. Again, there was a missing 301 between the two (head smacking ensues).
As a result, Google has selected the following pesky sitelink for one of the sitelinks returned during a brand search for the client. The brand search is returning a sitelink under www.domain.com as:
IIS7 IIS7When you click on the sitelink for IIS7, it's a link to m.domain.com which NOW redirects to www.domain.mobi.
My question is how long until the IIS7 sitelink goes away and is there anything we can do to speed it up?
What we've been doing to fix this:
1. Demoting sitelinks in GWT for www.domain.com that have the old subdirectory structure while the 301 redirects are being implemented. I can't demote this m.domain.com as a sitelink for www.domain.com because it's a different subdomain, and GWT will only allow me to demote subfolder pages or the www.domain.com itself
2. We've verified m.domain.com and demoted its homepage as a sitelink. Still not sure how this could stop it from showing up for a brand search that returns www.domain.com
Thanks in advance!
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Tom,
Would there be any benefit to use GWT's url removal tool for the old mobile website? m.domain.com?
Thanks,
Ellen
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Thanks Tom!
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Sorry I can't offer any more help here, but you've done exactly all I could recommend to speed up the process - demoting the pesky sitelinks.
Only thing really to add is to ensure that the links that you would want to appear in the sitelinks are recognised by Google as the most important landing pages - so link to them internally wherever you can and of course externally (though of course the 301s will help with this)
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