Open Site Explorer is finding old html Files that havn't been on my site in two years... even after a 301 Redirect. HELP!

[morganlindsaycole]

Hello!
My problem started when I became aware that when I checked my backlinks for the past two years, it states that no backlinks have been found.   When I ran a site analysis on SEMrush - No backlinks are found on the URL, or Domain.  There are 7 Backlinks on the Root Domain and those were configured in 2012.  I made a second domain www.columbusweddingphotographersreviews.comwhere I linked to my domain at www.morganlindsayphotography.com so I could test that google had crawled both websites and after, still no backlink was found.  I have also been published on a dozen or so wedding websites that has linked to my website where they are follow links and still nothing.  (http://www.brendasweddingblog.com/blogs/2015/2/23/an-elegant-fall-wedding-in-ohio-with-morgan-lindsay-photography)

**Website Background-  **
In 2012 I had two separate websites - One for Seniors that was an HTML website I build in Dreamweaver at www.morganlindsayphotography/seniors   and another for Wedding Clients found at www.morganlindsayphotography.com/Wedding  - (wordpress)  I had a Splash page wish was found atwww.morganlindsayphotography.com.  Two years ago when I became aware splash pages were frowned upon in Google, I combined the two websites and stayed with the Wordpress which was www.morganlindsayphotography.com/Wedding 
Because I did not want users to have to go to www.morganlindsayphotography.com/Wedding to view my url, Godaddy moved my wordpress site from thewww.morganlindsyphotography.com/Wedding  directory towww.morganlindsayphotography.com

When I ran the Open Site Explorer with Moz I found after runningwww.morganlindsayphotography.com the TOP pages on this domain according to Page Authority  are old HTML files from my senior website, as well as old Posts from when my wordpress site was found atwww.moragnlindsayphotography.com/Weddings 
No current pots or pages are showing up besideswww.morganlindsyphotography.com  I do run a cache management system to speed up my system and recently cleaned out my .htcacess folder and still had no luck.  This is difficulty something

**Last night I made a 301 Redirect in my htaccess for all the old links pointing to the new links as best as I could.  My htacess folder looks like this..

BEGIN WordPress

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule>

END WordPress

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /Wedding http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /Wedding/ http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /about.html http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/about-morgan-lindsay/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /app.html http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/blog/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /experience.html http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/senior-sessions/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /senior.html http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/ohio-senior-photographer/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /seniorsconstruction.html http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/ohio-senior-photographer/

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com

Redirect 301 /Wedding/2012/06/22/brittany-reis-jason-mcclaflin-tiffin-ohio-wedding/ http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/holy-family-church-columbus-wedding/

After I ran the open site moz explorer and the www.morganlindsayphotography/Wedding was still there..

[RyanPurkey]

I don't know if you're looking at the right thing...

• Your site is listing in Google if you check with a site:morganlindsayphotography.com search, so that's current.
• Plus DNS tools show that your site is pointing to the correct nameservers: https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/morganlindsayphotography.com.
• Further, there aren't any pages listed that are your old 'html' style: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Amorganlindsayphotography.com+inurl%3Ahtml.
• And I'm seeing pages that have been crawled as recently as February: site search with "past month" selected from search tools.
• If you're in Google Webmaster Tools and go to Google Index >> Index Status, you'll see a running timeline of how many pages Google has in their index up to recent dates.

Starting a new domain and rebuilding your site would be a bad idea as it would only delay OSE further.

[morganlindsaycole]

Hi Ryan, I undated my google sitmap to Google and bing two weeks ago and it still hasn't fixed anything. I re-uploaded today and still nothing. I understand it takes time but I feel like there may be another issue.

I I have a Google +. local page and have updated it weekly for the past 6 months. you can find my profile here https://plus.google.com/+MorganLindsayPhotographyTiffin

after doing some reserch I remembered I used to have used MAMP application configured and pointed to my www.morganlindsayphotography.com site two years ago. This was used to test a php contact form when my website was html: I also found a robot.txt file but no site map in the root folder. I checked the mamp folder and found files that are still coming up in the moz open site explorer In this mamp root folder.

the www.morganlindsayphotography.com/app.html

the www.morganlindsayphotography.com/senior.html

the www.morganlindsayphotography.com/experience.html

....all of the files found on my MAMP root directory for Www.morganlindsayphotography.com were the url's that were named in the folder of the  in the mamp application.. Could this be causing the issue? I'm ready to start a new domain and rebuild my site. I'm not sure what to do.

thanks again, Ryan!

[RyanPurkey]

Wow. Well the good news is that I see a sitemap at http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml which seems accurate to your current site. If you submit that within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing that will help refresh pages there.

The other aspect of all this stuff is getting more external links, so feel free to link up your social profiles: linkedin, twitter, facebook, etc. to point back to your site as your home page. You can announce new blog posts via twitter as well. You can also link up photography orientated sites like 500px, flickr, dphoto, and so on to point back to your main site as your home page within your profile.  All this should help update the other services as they crawl those sites.

The other aspect is local sites, like Google + Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Facebook and others. Moz Local covers many of them. Each of those also offers a place for you to point to your main site.

Updating throughout there should get you up to speed in no time. Plus David gave you the inside info on your site's status in OSE, so you should be set.  Cheers!

[DavidLee]

Anytime and you can use OSE to research those with high authority as well

Cheers!

[morganlindsaycole]

I will definitely keep that in mind when choosing who to submit publications too.  Thanks again!

[DavidLee]

Hi Morgan

The more sites that link to your blog posts and site, the higher chance there will be for our index to pick them up. Our index is based on freshness and importance so it's best to build your links on sites with high authority.

Hope this helps

[morganlindsaycole]

I just ran the index status in Google Webmaster tools and found that there are currently no files and hasn't been since July 2014 indexed from my domain name at www.morganlindsayphotography.com  -- This is nuts.

[morganlindsaycole]

Hi Ryan!  Thank you so much for your info. After running a few reports the SemRUSH, Ahref and Majectic... It is coming up that my domain http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com is not found.  Although, http://morganlindsayphotography.com is.   have uploaded my sitemap through google and bing and went into my Godaddy file manager to see if there was any issues there...

I found that there is no sitemap.xml folder found on my root directory in Godaddy and there are two videositemaps.xml one that says video-sitmap.xml and another that says video-sitemap.xml.gz.. Is it a problem that my regular sitemap.xml is not found in my root in my file manager with godaddy?  and is it a problem that there are two video-sitemap's? You have been so much help, thank you!

[morganlindsaycole]

I have updated my website and have new blog posts almost every week, so I'm nervous why there are no new links to crawl! I think there is something definitely wrong.  Thank you for time and answering my question!!

Morgan

[morganlindsaycole]

Hi Ryan!  Thank you so much for your info. After running a few reports the SemRUSH, Ahref and Majectic... It is coming up that my domain http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com is not found.  Although, http://morganlindsayphotography.com is.   have uploaded my sitemap through google and bing and went into my Godaddy file manager to see if there was any issues there...

I found that there is no sitemap.xml folder found on my root directory in Godaddy and there are two videositemaps.xml one that says video-sitmap.xml and another that says video-sitemap.xml.gz.. Is it a problem that my regular sitemap.xml is not found in my root in my file manager with godaddy?  and is it a problem that there are two video-sitemap's? You have been so much help, thank you!

[DavidLee]

Hey Morgan!

It appears we last crawled your site on November 14th 2014. If we do not re-crawl a site, data can be stored in our index for up to 160 days. In order for us to update you information we will need to discover new links to re-crawl. There are a couple in the queue for processing from Wedding Wire so you should see those top pages update in the next 1-2 index updates.

Hope this helps!

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Morgan. Your updates look good. One thing with OSE is that it doesn't update instantaneously and is actually refreshed on a monthly schedule or so which means any changes you make that work well in Google and on your site will take a while to get recorded in OSE. Did you try checking your site in the webmaster tools Google and Bing offer? Uploading the current sitemap should help clear things up further.  The latest update is scheduled for March 11th at which time you might see this information updated, see: http://moz.com/products/api/updates for past information and this post discussing OSE: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here in more detail.

There are also some other backlink checking tools out there such as Ahrefs and Majestic that are useful for finding even more links. Mostly OSE is suited for checking the link profile of several competitors and getting ideas one where else you can market your site. For example, if you know of some other photography sites that are ranking highly you can add them into OSE and begin to see what they've done and how you could improve.  Your current work looks fine though so you should be good to go. Cheers!

[morganlindsaycole]

yes! I love that the open site explorer allows  you to check backlinks... When I found that none of my backlinks were showing up from other websites I know I have been published at, I dug further into the top pages tab linking to my domain and found the only pages it was pulling were old worspress pages and old html files from two years ago. there is no access to those files anywhere on my website And hey have been deleted two years ago.

Thank you for your reply!

[LauraSultan]

The purpose of Open Site Explorer is to show backlinks. It is not intended to show how those links are redirected on your site. If your 301 redirects are set up properly, anyone who clicks on them will be redirected to the proper page on your site. However, you would have to ask the websites linking to you to change the URLs if you want those URLs to be updated (and reflected in OSE).