301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
-
Hello,
We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March.
I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename"
The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k.
However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise.
My question -
What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
-
See https://moz.com/community/q/in-google-search-console-https-or-non-https
-
The HTTP:// will be added on to any non-HTTPS URL Automatically.
I always type it in HTTP:// because of habit, however, it does not make a difference because Google ads it the only time this makes a difference is when adding HTTPS://
So it makes no difference whatsoever as long as you have
the four versions of your encrypted site you can choose between
Google is indexing more than one of the four below.
-
http://
-
https://
-
just be certain that all four are there do not worry about the non-encrypted http://
https://moz.com/ugc/accidental-seo-tests-when-on-page-optimization-ceases-to-matter
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/news/https-when-to-act/
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/https-dilemma-security-seo/
I hope that answers your question.
All the best,
Thomas
-
-
Hi,
Instead of using "site:domain.com" search to check indexation, I would use Search Console for more accurate information.
Did you verify your new site and submitted the change of address in Search Console?
Thanks,
-
Hello,
I would double check to make sure that all versions of that older domain were redirected, the www and non www, http and https, make sure they all are redirected to the same one.
Make sure that nothing has been done with the redirects in any form, I don't know if anyone else has access to these redirects, but it's very easy for someone to of done something.
Also make sure that these are actually being indexed and Google isn't just having some weird rankbrain fart with the pages it's cached, as I too did a redirect / redesign in march abouts and have been awaiting 700 pages to go bye bye from indexing, however we're down to 659 now, sometimes this number goes up sometimes it goes down a few, but nothing wild.
So when you do a site.domain.com search, Google might show you 100+ pages, but click towards the end of them and see if Google shows you the results or if the page count actually decreases and nothing is shown, this would mean that the pages are just cached and on the road to being forgotten.
Google will keep caches for a bit, in case of an opps moment or even hack attack recovery.
But from 78k to 89k seems like a big jump, but if you had 400k pages to start with, and when you do a site:domain.com and if the last group of pages return nothing, there is a good chance this is just Google's url caching dreaming of electric sheep...
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
-
How do I treat URLs with bookmarks when migrating a site?
I'm migrating an old website into a new one, and have several pages that have bookmarks on them. Do I need to redirect those? or how should they be treated? For example, both https://www.tnscanada.ca/our-expertise.html and https://www.tnscanada.ca/our-expertise.html#auto resolve .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NatalieB_Kantar0 -
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Difficulty with Indexing Pages - Desperate for Help!
I have a website with product pages that use the same URL, but load different data based on what's passed to them with GET. I am using a Wordpress website, but all of the page information is retrieved from a database using PHP and displayed with PHP. Somehow these pages are not being indexed by Google. I have done the following: 1. Created a site map pointing to each page. 2. Defined URL parameters in Search Console for these type of pages. 3. Created a product schema using schema.org, and tested it without errors. I have requested re-indexing repeatedly and these pages and images on the pages are still not being indexed! Does anybody have any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacleaves0 -
Weird Indexing Issues with the Pages and Rankings
When I found the my page was non-existent on the search results page, I requested Google to index my page via the Search Console. And then just a few minutes after I did that, that page rose to top 3 ranking on the search page (with the same keyword and browser search). It happens to most of the pages on my website. Maybe a week later the rankings sank again, and I had to do the process again to make my pages to the top. Any reasons to explain this phenomenon, and how I can fix this issue? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrmrsteven0 -
Preserving link equity from old pages
Hi Moz Community, We have a lot of old pages built with Dreamweaver a long time ago (2003-2010) which sit outside our current content management system. As you'd expect they are causing a lot of trouble with SEO (Non-responsive, duplicate titles and various other issues). However, some of these older pages have very good backlinks. We were wondering what is the best way to get rid of the old pages without losing link equity? In an ideal world we would want to bring over all these old pages to our CMS, but this isn't possible due to the amount of pages (~20,000 pages) and cost involved. One option is obviously to bulk 301 redirect all these old pages to our homepage, but from what we understand that may not lead to the link equity being passed down optimally by Google (or none being passed at all). Another option we can think of would be to bring over the old articles with the highest value links onto the current CMS and 301 redirect the rest to the homepage. Any advice/thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thumbs up! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3gcouk0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0