Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain

[COEDMediaGroup]

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

[COEDMediaGroup]

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,

[Reinhart]

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

[COEDMediaGroup]

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

[EGOL]

I have never used godaddy hosting.  I am sorry but I am not familiar with how this works.

[COEDMediaGroup]

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

[COEDMediaGroup]

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?

[stever999]

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!

[StreamlineMetrics]

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).

[EGOL]

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?