I am going to assume the 301 redirects are working when you click on them?
Hi Thomas,
Yes, the 301s work and confirmed with http headers
_You need to go into Google Webmaster tools and tell Google that you have moved from domain A to domain B this will make Google bot crawl both sites vigorously looking for 301 redirects. _
The migration was before my time, but I think that this was done. If I try to use the change of address on the old site, X.com, I just get a "There is no change of address pending for your site." message with no control options (conversely, if I tried to do the same thing for the current Y.com, it would give me the full list of instructions on how to migrate my site.)
I want to be certain that you did not 301 redirect domain to domain and not page to page. So if site X has homepage, about page, whatever page, and site Y would contain the exact same pages or equivalent pages that you would have already 301 redirected page 2 page not just point the domain at the other domain is that right?
The 301s are at a page level at X.com to the same equivalent page at Y.com. The majority of pages have migrated over without obvious problems. But it's a little disturbing to see new pages of y.com which have never been part of x.com somehow make it into a site:x.com query and listed with an x.com domain to start the URL.
So just to recap, site:x.com shows long-tail pages that clearly belong to site:y.com and were never part of x.com. The <title>of some of the site:x.com pages. for instance, are definitely from y.com pages. For some reason, Google is associating these pages with the x.com domain.</p> <p>If you click on the cached version of a listing for site:x.com, the cached version will show the content and URL of Y.com/foo in the cached description header. Clicking on the actual link gets you 301d from X.com/foo to Y.com/foo. Both events indicate that the 301 is working and that Google is recognizing the 301.</p> <p>I don't know if this impacting our SERPs or not. If I do a very page-specific search for "blue widgets A, B, and C in Montana" for a page that is indexed in both site:x.com and site:y.com, you only see y.com's page which is expected behavior. You don't see x.com in the SERPs for that specific query. It's only if you do site:x.com "blue widgets A, B, and C in Montana" do you see the duplicate listing. But again, clicking on the URL that is shown results in a 301 to the proper y.com page.</p> <p>I can dig deeper with my developers, check logs, etc. But it's weird. It's almost like Google sees a URL for y.com and indexes that URL for x.com and y.com even though it knows that y.com is the dominant or real page (evidenced by cached data info). Everytime I click on an site:x.com link, I get 301 redirected properly to the y.com equivalent.</p></title>