Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.
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Hi,
We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop! (oh the joy of providing SEO services!)
Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry).
They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me?
So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain.
The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time.
How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process?
Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point.
Thanks and look forward to the advice!
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If all 301s have been removed then this is how I would see the end result:
examplesiteA.com is a brand new site sitting on an old domain. examplesiteA has many links to it whereby users are expected to see the pages which were there but are not moved to another site. The biggest issue is a percentage of the linking sites may realize the change and break their links. If the links are maintained, then I don't see any reason for dilution or devaluation.
examplesiteB.com is the old site from the "A" location. When the site moved, the 301s were in place. Assuming Google crawled every page of the old "A" site and found all the 301'd pages, then they are aware of the moved pages and have updated their index.
The challenges is, this move clearly kicked up a lot of dust. How long will it take Google to fully index both sites? Until that happens the rankings may bounce.
There is a SEO theory that links increase in value with age. I disbelieve that theory; therefore, I don't believe you would experience any link dilution. The only issue would occur if a user expecting to find SiteB at the end of a link now finds SiteA, and therefore removes the link due to not being satisfied with the changed page.
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