Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 1:55 PM
Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site's performance in Google search results?
Your aim is to make the transition invisible and seamless to the user, and to make sure that Google knows that your new pages should get the same quality signals as the pages on your own site. When you're moving your site, pesky 404 (File Not Found) errors can harm the user experience and negatively impact your site's performance in Google search results.
Let's cover moving your site to a new domain (for instance, changing from www.example.com to www.example.org). This is different from moving to a new IP address; read this post for more information on that.
Here are the main points:
- Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.
- Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google's search results. When you're satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don't do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.
- If you're changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.
- Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn't practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu
to make sure you don't have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like .../recipes/chocolatecake.html).
- To prevent confusion, it's best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.
- Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.
- Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn't showing unwanted 404 errors.
113 comments:
I'm going through this with a client at the moment, so thanks for the useful info.
Is it a good idea to get the new sites pages indexed before doing any 301s, does this speed up the whole process from Google's point of view?
Thanks for the info! If it's not feasible to find all your inbound links and change them, what is the net effect of the redirect on link juice? Would you say the new page inherits a good portion of the benefits from inbound links directed to the old redirected page?
If you've set up redirects on all your site's URLs, shouldn't that address the issue of redirecting internal links?
It's not the internal links I'm worried about, it's external. Many of my external links are quite old, and I doubt I could get all of those changed even if I tried... so my question is whether those inbound links going to the old URL are going to pass on their link love to the new page fully? Or is there some kind of bleed effect where some of the link juice gets diluted going through the redirect?
Thanks!
When I say external links, I'm referring to external *inbound* links, by the way. :)
Alex, you will not be able to get the new site indexed at all or it will be very poorly indexed as long as the old one is still around without it being redirected url by url. This is simply because the new site's urls will in fact contain duplicate content and there's no reason to index duplicate content.
If you move one url and simply delete it from the old site this takes care of duplication BUT does nor redirect so it will be be harder to get the new url into the index as it will have no accrued value.
Whatever method you decide to use make sure this leaves behind no duplicate content and no broken links.
Oh, I have to say it... Hail Xenu!
Seriously though, other than its somewhat unstyled page design, it looks useful.
“Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.”
Huh? So you want both websites live at the same time? No duplicate content issues here? If not how long are we supposed to wait to “check” and see if it worked? 1 day, 1 week, 1 month? What about the ramifications of other searches engines during this process? Google is not the only one you know. Maybe I am missing something? :)
“To prevent confusion, it's best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.”
Interesting…why?
The 301 redirection means there is no duplicationn for the pages that are involved.
As for the others... well they'd not have been moved yet.
Anyhting that has nto been redirected yet needs to be be protected from robots on the new site in order to avoid duplication.
I'd say the test will be conclusive right away: a redirection either works or doesn't anyway. There are tools to test (not just relying on the browser), such as web-sniffer.net . This will tell you right away if the redirection is happening and if it is correct.
And yes, Xenu is hugely useful.
We just moved 4 seperate sites into our main one and did the 301 redirects - but only one of the domains had its page rank transfer. Our former superstar site (http://www.DownDeals.com) lost all of its page rank when pointing to the section of the site it does it's 301 to (http://www.ShopDownLite.com). Were not really sure what else we can do?
Is there a way to change the domain name of a site with a few million pages indexed in Google without having Google re-crawl everything? The address will be identical, and all pages will be 301 redirected.
For published Toolbar PR you need to wait for the next round. For what it's worth that is, which is very very little and not worth worrying about.
In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied. I don't see how else you expect this to happen. It's not as if you can just highlight a bunch of urls, right click and rename them.
There is a lot more than just changing urls, it's rebuilding all the backlinks and stats and everythign else. They don't all exist in vacuum - all are connected.
"it's best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days."
I would rather suggest to retain control of the old site domain for several years.
There are many cybersquatters out there that would be happy to take possession of your old domain, park it and make money from the traffic you used to have, and many shady SEOs that would be happy to take the control of the back links still pointing to the old domain (they wouldn't keep 301s for you, of course).
Some bad guys could also use your old domain to damage your brand image, too.
I think that even if 301s took place and effect months ago, abandon an old domain that used to receive traffic is DEFINITELY a bad idea. After all, it's a matter of just few dollars per year.
What if you CAN'T use 301 redirects (because your old site is at a free host or something and all you can do is upload HTML)? I've tried using meta refresh tags, but Google doesn't seem to consider those to be redirects.
You have to do the meta refresh correctly:
1)0 seconds meta refresh
2) a robots noindex meta tag.
3) no page content except a plain html link to the new page, nothing else. No css, no images, no adding any content whatsoever.
Then it works and quite fast as far as changing urls over to the new site in the index goes.
Whether inbound links also get transferred, no idea.
There is a very important part missing here.
In many cases you move from an old site to a new site with a different URL structure. As you can read in this post, you better do some research to find out which pages get the best traffic on your old site and make sure their content moves to the new site, with an appropriate 301 from the old page to the new page.
Hopefully, Google's technology will advance to the point of automatically determining when a domain has been moved - then automatically giving all the benefits to the new site
If a site is popular - it is an ordeal to trace and contact EVERYONE who has given you a backlink.
Many links have occurred from social sites or articles; those links WON'T be changed.
Here is a suggestion: Allow the Webmasters to contact you with a request to transfer all the backlinks and pagerank to the new domain AFTER THEY HAVE VERIFIED OWNERSHIP TO YOUR SATISFACGTION
webado said...
"you will not be able to get the new site indexed at all or it will be very poorly indexed....
...there's no reason to index duplicate content."
I'm not sure what you mean by this, as I've seen a lot of page in Goog's index that are duplicates, so i assume that any checking for duplication takes place long after a sites pages are indexed.
My thinking is to speed up the whole process, the engines need to know about the target pages before 301s are implemented.
Alex, this is unnecessary:
"My thinking is to speed up the whole process, the engines need to know about the target pages before 301s are implemented."
In fact it's the opposite. The old pages need to be recrawled for the redirection to be discovered. But there's no need to know about the new urls first. And the new ones won't get indexed (or will at first but then drop out) until the old ones are gone or redirected because of duplicate content.
Sure you have been seeing lots of duplication but it's getting weeded out as of when it's discovered by the robots enabled to analyze that.
"Hopefully, Google's technology will advance to the point of automatically determining when a domain has been moved - then automatically giving all the benefits to the new site"
The thing is there is no such thing as a moved domain. There is only a domain with the same content as another domain.
In order to indicate it's been moved you have to 301 redirect the old one to the new one. And yes, if you do things that way, Google's and other search engines' technology understands perfectly well that it is a moved domain.
This is the same old stuff that has always been said and done when moving domains, but there has still been people negatively affected in the SERPs after perfectly implementing this..
Are you officially stating that moving to another domain will definately not affect ur rankings if done the above way?
I followed this practice to the letter (I think), in moving from .com to .co.uk, in March. The .com domain disappeared from the search results (where they had appeared on page 1 for many keywords) and the .co.uk was not ranked at all.
Slowly the .co.uk has appeared and moved up the search results, but it is as if it is a brand new site.
The pagerank has not moved from the old to the new still. I asked for assistance on the Google Webmaster Help group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/93c9474999bde9c6/fac9e48efe78fa7b?#fac9e48efe78fa7b, but still it does not work.
What did I do wrong?
If my domain rename, and also the structure of URLs?
With redirect URLs old to the new would be good?
If there are thousands of redirections work?
We are currently moving a very large and important site.
Any advice on doing this for a forum?
Gee guys isn't this post 5 years too late?
Seriously it's been done in many of the top webmaster forums and being its 2008 Google should be offering current information and not outdated fill....
It's not outdated. As long as there are people who still don't understand how to move a site, the need for 301 redirections and how to do them and what to expect, it's never outdated.
Hello!
Excellent Post, this will help to understand to many users and webmaster not to fear when doing a transitional step to new domain. Specially when info is coming from Google Webmaster central blog.
Keep us informed with good info as always!
My best regards.
And if you are included in Google News, make sure you use their online form to let them know you moved to a new domain and site structure.
Brent D. Payne
I have 301'd a whole domain to another, including the sitemap.xml. Further I have dropped the sitemap.xml record from the Webmaster Tools for the old site.
From what I'm reading, Google still needs to crawl the old site, so would it be quicker if the sitemap.xml was left standing although redirecting?
It doesn't need a sitemap to crawl a site.
Besides, if the urls in a sitemap are being redirected they will be rejected.
Thank you for the useful comments. I am about to move a web site right now for a client and this was a good review on 301s. I recently updated my site ( www.resurrectionmedia.com ) and found that google still has old links to the site but that over time the new pages are being found.
We are doing this for a client at the moment with several thousand pages - he has no choice but to change his URL sadly - and we get huge amount of traffic form Google which I am worried about loosing - especially as his old URL contains one of his main keywords.
Essentially it could kill of his business if the impact is too big and that is his livelihood so I feel some pressure!
We have done everything as best practice dictates, but now I have 2 sites in the Webmaster console - the old one 301s to the new one... do I need to add the XML sitemap for the new URL to the old URL in the webmaster console? Or shall I just leave it as it is?
I am kind of impressed with myself at the moment. When I moved The Other Blog http://www.bradsotherblog first from one directory to a sub domain, then to redirected domain on the site and then the entire domain to a new hosting company I actually figured most of these steps out on my own. I still made some mistakes along the way, but I really am going to serve myself up a beer for a job well done without any clues beforehand.
Hmm, does Google look at the similarity of the old indexed URL and compare with the new page that it is directed to? Or is this just a best practice thing?
I was just wondering if you know why google lists so few of the actual links to a site on theier query (link:www.site.com). Of the thousands of links to my site only a handful are shown? How do they choose what links they list? Why don’t they list all of them? Is there any rhyme or reason to which ones are included and not? Is that about age, relevance, content or quality of the linking site? If they are not listed does taht mean that google does not recognize them and that they are not given any weight? Thanks. my url is http://www.bullardrealty.net
Now don't forget the right size for your Uhaul truck. :D Make sure all files and folders fit in too.
Is there anything we can do if we no longer have control of an old URL, but the OLD content is still posted? The host has been no help in taking the content down.
Thanks for the 301 refresher. I'm a little worried about having duplicate content. Wouldn't that be grounds for a penalty?
Lori, if you have no control over the hosting where that content is located there's nothing you can do.
Spidersavvy, having duplicate content doesn't bring about penalties. It does however dilute the value of all the duplicated pages, as only one at most will likely get indexed, while there may be links to either of them. This will result in poorer ranking. Much better to consolidate all the dups under one single url and apply 301 redirections from all the dups to it, ensuring your navigation only uses the one url.
Due to the current site structure, we might need to use a double 301 redirect.
would this be a bad idea?
my domain name is deportivos.com. How come when I do a search for deportivos my domain doesn't come up on top?
Felipe
Felipe, I strongly suggest you go to the Webmasters Help Group and ask there what's wrong with your site. You will get lots of feedback and it will be up to you to act on the advice you'll get. This blog isn't the place for this.
Question... I added several new webpages to my site. Never redirected anything. Everything stayed same except addition of new pages. On Google Sitemaps, I'm being told that I have 10 404 errors on 10 of the webpages, HOWEVER all of those pages DO exist. They are found on server.
I'm not a web person so wanted to ask what is the possible explanation for this???? Thanks. J
Jules, please post your specific problem in the Webmaster Help Group. This is not the place to debug your site.
Our web site http://www,servifans.com was made in 2002.
After 6 years running , we have 12.000 pages indexed but we have always about 10.000 pages that are indexed or not , sometimes are indexed , sometimes don'y appear in google.
We have sitemap but we can understand the reason .
KIM,
ventas@servifans.com
We're looking at moving a site to a new domain name for branding purposes.. Question? We want to continue to use the old domain as well... can you continue to use the old domain if you 301 re-direct or is the old domain unusable because it's only purpose now is to tell the search engines the files/directories have been moved? pls help
in order to post a sitemap i had to change my web address to http://www.a1qualitysafe.com/site/408162/page/45030
as i did not have the rights to the root url as this belonged to my shopping cart company. so i got my own doname name and had the cart point to the new address. i submitted the sitemap got all my pages indexed. but my page rank droped from a 3 or 4 to a 0 and my hits fell about a 150 a day. why did my page rank not transfer to the new address. my old address
http://www.storesonline.com/site/408162/page/45030 that ive had since the year 2000 no longer shows its rank either. i would not care about rank if i was not so dependent on the sites income
best regards
steven g
Hi,
Great info.Wish i had gone through all this before learning the hard way.
I recently updated my website and removed all urls with duplicated content,added internal links etc.
However as soon as i have carried out the changes, i am finding that googlebot has stopped cralwing my website.Last crawl was 14 days back.
I created a webmaster account,verified site,added and tested robots.txt,added sitemap.There are no errors but simply googlebot isnt crawling it for last 14 days.
The only error it shows is 404 error for my those urls which i have already removed but those are anyway not part of my website now.
Can u throw sum insight.
Thanx!
Hi Vijay
Some here. Googlebot dont crawl my site for 1 month and I dont know how I have 100´s of 401 that i dont know where they come from...and my page rank is now zero :(
Remembering that there is more to life than google
Tim Berners-Lee wrote in "Cool URIs don't change"
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.
Jakob Nielsen wrote in "Fighting Linkrot"
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html
Any URL that has ever been exposed to the Internet should live
forever: never let any URL die since doing so means that other sites
that link to you will experience linkrot.
Hello Everybody,
Could anybody tell me if i change the file/webpage extension e.g .html to .php without change the file name and text-content, how could i pass the the current page rank and back links to the newly extension pages?
Thanks,
Rahul Lonkar
Looking for some feedback -- we did a mod rewrite of some of our best seo pages (b/c we built new landing pages to deliver a better user experience for our shoppers) when we should have done a 301 redirect. For 7 weeks, we didn't realize the mistake. Only when we saw sweeping ranking falls did we figure out our error and we did a 301 – is it possible that in that 7 weeks we were hit with some sort of penalty (dupe content or otherwise) that would require an appeal? If not, will the 301 now pick up the old seo values and properly transfer them to the new pages and how long does that process take?
What if I have lost the domain name? I have a site and forgot to do the 301 redirect in time, now the old site is hosted by some "free parking" guys who do advertising on well-visited domains, how can I delete these indices?
@myself...
so for example the domain:
http://awis-islamforschung.de has been given up for good and the content is now 1-1 (e.g. all internal links stay proportional to the new domain) on http://awis-islamforschung.eu
the search index still has several old links to the site in TLD .de
where can I delete http://awis-islamforschung.de because these are just some bad guys who think that publishing no-content on a site with good traffic gives them more advertising power.
I wonder why google doesn't take the chance to quickly remove the site from the index...
... and uses it for their own advertisement...
I know that this is happening sooner or later and I am not loosing anything, but would like to speed up the process, where could I do that?
In time the pages indexed for the old domain will drop out or change their title & snippet in the index, since they no longer exist or are getting redirected to something else with a different content.
A lesson to be learned - never lose a domain by being careless about renewal or not locking it and not paying attention to what happens to it - somebody, anybody can request a transfer of an unlocked domain to their own name and if you don't react fast they can actually do it after about a week unchallenged.
We have just re-branded and re-designed our site (from asp - php). We are also moving it to a new webserver in a different location with a new IP.
I did want to change domain straight away but, after reading this I think I will do it in stages.
Do you think I should keep the domain as is and implement the new site design changes with the 301 redirect on as many pages as possible. Then a couple of months later try and do a 301 to the new domain.
Also, Someone told me to do a 302 from the new domain to the old domain for several months before making the switch. Has anyone else had experience with this.
I Have Shift My Blogs From Blogger To Wordpress anf Fails To Insert 301 Redirect, Due To This My previously Index Blogs Lose His Page Rank and They Move From 1 Page To 200 Page. Now i Hv Deleted all Transfered 600 Blogs ,bUT sTILL mY bLOGS ARE NOT SHOWING i gOOGLE SEARCH WHEN EVER I TRY TO SEARCH It Will only Display
Blog Header name.
Kindly Help What To Do ,
To provide better service to our customers, I am in the process of changing html to asp and redesigning the whole website. How is it going to affect my ranking? For example www.example.com/blog.html is going to be www.example.com/blog.asp
Could anybody please give me some suggestions?
Which is more important in ranking criteria - having keywords in the URL or having a good 8 year site history with Google? Our site of 8 yrs has some free content and some content only for paid members. The site set up doesn't allow for keywords in URL. We would like to add a second domain that would allow keywords in url and we would only have our free content on that site. We still want to have our existing site with the paid content but it also needs to show the free content (duplication) so our paid members don't have to flip back and forth between the two. Will this lower our rankings for the existing site to have duplicate content on the new domain OR is it better to create a subdomain on the existing site which would not affect history record (rankings) but wouldn't not allow for keywords in the url. Which is more important, established site history or keywords in url?
Shellie -
I wouldn't mess with the keyword in the URL thing. There is so much weight given to an old domain, it's hard to compete with 8 year site history. New domains get historically tossed into the 'sandbox' with google and might take 6 months to even show up in the rankings-- maybe paying for a listing in the yahoo directory can help new domains, since google gives that importance (spammers won't pay the $250 listing fee the reasoning goes and a legitimate site owner would).
The only advantage from an SEO stand point of having the keyword in the URL is for backlinking purposes. Because most back links will be your of your URL.
Now if you are having many back links on your 8 year site that link to you by your url and your url doesn't mean anything to your niche-- then I would suggest an aggressive link campaign to either try to get your existing links changed to keywords that make money and to get new links and asked to be linked to by those keywords.
And yes, you will get penalized by duplicate content... and the thing you can't control is which site will be penalized either by not being indexed or being put in the supplemental index. Either way it's not good.
Very nice article for bloggers
Hi thanks for the post.Nice blog.Now this blog is in my favourite bookmark pages.
http://www.squidoo.com/papershredderarticles
I have a similar problem.
For 4 years a important site work with IP without domain name. The site is indexed with Pagerank 5.
Now the client want to have a domain name.
How to move from IP to Domain name ???
The "new" site is on line, on Webmasters Tools is verified and Sitemaps is ok but with Pagerank 2!!!.
The old site is on line and verified also.
But in end 2008 the client want to move in other ISP (and other IP).
Any help is appreciated.
On the site reachable by IP you have to implement 301 redirectitons to the urls on the domain.
It's interesting to read all the comments here and the experiences of people. I've been involved in a few site migrations in the past and it's gratifying to know that other people have the same issues, but also worrying that the same problems still crop up.
I know from speaking to colleagues that these guidelines still aren't followed and as Google becomes more and more important as a source of traffic, it's staggering that choices about a change as big as a new domain name aren't taken particularly seriously.
In my experience, most domain changes are made for reasons anything other than technical or strategic...."we need a new domain name" being the level of thought.
The Berners-Lee article is excellent - reading it makes me think of the billions of little traces we leave around the web in the form of URLs.
When moving a site from one domain to another it would be good to be able to use the sitemap to show that the files where being located.
As of this moment I have put in 301 redirects for individual files but how should I handle the sitemap - simply remove it which is what I have already done?
I am currently getting this error
URLs not followed
When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted.
Thanks,
Nigel
I'm going to try this out soon, thanks for the information it's just the kind of information that I needed. I think that It will take a while before everything goes well..
It won't affect my keywords right?
Thank you very much for the info.
We just moved to our new domain http://www.parents-and-kids.com and did the 301 redirects. Could you please tell us usually how soon the page rank will be transferred to the new domain from the old one?
I designed and drew up my own house plans, but I am not an architect. I built my own house, but I am not a contractor. I designed and published my own website, but I do not consider myself a webmaster. I have learned a lot and know about websites and need some help. I have looked and searched all over the internet for answers but have come up confused. Very simply put, I decided to change several of my page names on my site to better names. The realization that i needed to do a 301 redirect became obvious. It is the how to that has stumped me. My files are html files. I just want to let the SE crawlers know that I changed myfile.html to my-file.html. I have yet to find the answer for my particular case.
I have a windows based OS host. If it was linux, I know I could use the .htaccess file. None of my files are .asp, .php, etc. I would know how to 301 redirect if they were. I have contacted my host and I get the see the help file answer response which just says do what the help file says which does not address my circumstances.
I hope this is the proper place to ask this question. If not, please forgive me. I hope that maybe the real masters might be looking here and could have mercy on a webslave.
Well individual help is best done in teh group.
However sicne you asked, it's possible you may be able to use this:
http://www.jlh-design.com/2006/08/301-redirects-in-asp-on-iis-server/
and if all else fails:
http://groups.google.com/group/only-validation/web/meta-refresh-redirection
Other than that, of course, you could always change hosting to an Apache server :)
Thanks webado. I had read the first link and had tried it and got a warning from google about the double re-direct. I appreciate the second link and have been leary about the loss of PR. Wait! Wait! I read your bio and know your thoughts on such. I have spent a lot of time getting my site recognized about a subject that is important to me and I believe many others and I do not want to lose ground just because I re-named my pages. Like I said, I am not the master.
Livingonsolar, I don't know what may have been the problem with the redirections you tried for an IIS server. Maybe you made a mistake.
As for my view on toolbar PR .. they are the same as those of many people. Toolbar PR has nothing to do with how well your site can rank at any moment in time and for what. Not only because it's outdated at all times, but also because it's unrelated to any search terms whatsoever, so it could never be an indicator of how well you'd do NOW for THAT search. Only a search will tell you that.
Thanks again for helping. The redirect actually worked. I named a directory the same name as the old file and placed a default,asp file with the redirect in that directory. It went right to the new page. The warning came from Google soon after that they didn't like it. I did read a post from one of the Google group that this would be okay. Maybe I should just ask Google to remove the old files from the cache since all the new ones are showing up and not worry about any perceived loss on my part. I guess I won't worry about the fact that they are telling me I have duplicate files now either. I suppose that I can say the one thing that I have learned so far is that webmasters jobs have been made more complicated by those who abuse the system. Designing a nice site is not enough any more. My hat is off to you!
That kind of redirection is a special trick to go around a crappy system (IIS) when you have no console access. It's better than not being able to handle it at all. Like with all redirections just make sure your sitemap does not contain the old url which yo are redirecting. Also ensure your navigation is updated similarly to use the new final destination at all times.
G8 job....plz visit my site...
http://mobilephonnee.blogspot.com
My website is 15 years old. I will have to move to a new server. I know that Google values the age of a site (trust factor). Does getting a new IP address for the same domain name rewind the clock and make my website a brand-new website again, so that the "trust factor" disappears?
No, it shoudln't be a factor. People move their sites all the time.
I guess they got tired of all the people working on javascript hacks to track adsense clicks, and finaly thought: “If the crowd wants it, we might aswell implement it”.
Is there a maximum number of 301s that should not be exceeded at any given time? For example I have a client with a large site that needs to change the site structure, is it OK to have potentially hundreds of 301s at the same time?
Hi, i've tried to read all the post, but i don't think anybody replied to amy about the benefits of changing the urls from the backlinks. ( cf original post : Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain)
Is there really a benefit with doing that when u've done correctly the 301's page by page...
Thanks a lot for helping me..;
One of our competitors is considering getting out of the business and we are negotiating to buy their domain name.
If this goes through, we'd like to send their customers/visitors to our website. The idea is to 301 their entire domain to ours.
Site structures are different (as are brands carried) so some of the pages on their domain will 301 to non existing pages and result in a 404.
Their site is 4 years old (PR 2), our site is less than a year old (PR 4).
Will this cause any type of problem, as we're dealing with two existing domain names (not moving site to a new domain)?
Any advice to make this is smooth process?
Thank you,
Marc
you may use 301 or meta redirect system as guided at http://wixade.com/ article.
I have a question:
I recently used a redirect (since I have limited access to the old site from here on), only the target host was a generic "under construction" sign. Now, the search that brought me up to #1 has someone else's site there that had the same "under construction" page, presumably because it was a shared page. Does google check periodically to see if that link goes to the same place, or have I just given my google ranking to a complete stranger forever?
I changed from using HTML to using wordpress and had to remove my old html pages as it conflicted with wordpress. I did the 301 redirects. This was in May08. Since then Googlebot although reading the sitemap.xml without a problem doesn't index any of the pages. The website is www.immigration2australia.com
Can anyone help. Is there a problem with the 301 redirects?
I have tried to get through to Google but haven't found an email address that I can use for someone at Google to help.
Can anyone help. Is there a problem with the 301 redirects?
Thanks
Gill
Gill, you should really have posted this in the Webmaster Help group. But anyway here it goes:
You have this meta tag on all your pages (cannot use < and > here):
meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow'
This of course blocks all robots.
There are settings in WP where you can enable robots access, for now they are all blocked.
I am transferring a Wordpress blog from www.domain.com/blog to www.newblog.com. I have fewer than 500 posts and own the original domain and will maintain the root site. I can use WP to make an exact duplicate of post, cats, tags, etc.
In reading the original posts and comments, it sounds like I need to do a 301 redirect for each post. Then verify internal links and ask other bloggers to update inbound links.
Have I got that right?
I find lots of examples of 301's. Is there any way to know the BEST way according to Google?
Thanks in advance.
b
If you are transfering FROM an Apache server and if the page names on the new site will be the same (except for not being in the folder called /blog/) then you can use the .htaccess file to do 301 redirection in a single directive.
Create or edit the .htaccess file that is located in the /blog/ folder of the old site and put just this in it:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
It is on the SAME server (Apache).I merely used the 'Addon domain' feature in Cpanel.
I believe the traffic will grow and I don't want to confuse my analytics with the main site.
Also, I only have to do this one edit? I don't have to do something for each post?
PTL! I could not imagine having to do that!
btw, THANKS
Yes, if the uris are the same.
Otherwise it is one by one.
I suggest that if you need more help, you should post in the group, it's not appropriate for a blog to discuss details of implementation.
Will do. Thanks.
Does anyone know how long a 'Google Image Search' takes to pick up the 301 redirect.
The 'Standard' search results seem to have picked up the move without any noticeable penalty - but all my images have disappeared!
no working for google 301
i move forum.applesana.com to foro.applesana.es
in htaccess:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.applesana.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.applesana.es/$1 [r=301,nc]
and google see 2 domain, external links foro.applesana.es
http://imagenes.fotocarrete.com/images/fnf1h0q8ipv0zdfwwd8.jpg
maybe bug google?
Well it's very easy to test your own redirections. Do they work as expected? I think not.
You need to be more specific than that. You have to redirect both the domain and each subdomain, respectively.
Anyway, this blog is NOT the place to solve your specific bugs. Got to the hel group for that.
Very good info, will help me. Thanks
Hallo,
I am very sorry but I don't know if this is the correct blog but I have a problem with google. I have my videoblog in first position using this keywords "free medical videos" (I am really happy) but unfortunatly this page is the loging page of my blog.
What can I do? Have I to change my web address?
thank you
www.videoclinical.com
I'm doing the redirect from an old site to a new one. I have the list of urls to redirect (300 entries), but I have 2 options to redirect:
- Do it using .htacces (redirect) for each entry, or
- Using the 404 page, with an script that redirect to new page, sending the 301 header.
What's the best practice for this?
Definitely not the 404. The subsequent redirection will never be found by robots, they stop at the 404.
You need the sitewide 301 redirection using .htaccess. It does not have to be one page at a time unless you also changed the page uris. If your pages have niot changed, then there's a single .htaccess directive whcih will 301 redirect the whole thing.
Hi.
Since I've moved site, Google isn't finding any of my pages what so ever.
It finds my old posts, and inevitably Page Not Found appears. But all new posts dont even get picked up on Google anymore.
Also, if it does show up it shows up with a direct link to the page as apposed to a link to the post.
Any idea on how to deal with this?
Will the 301 Redirect transfer your Alexa rank as well?
I switched domains and redirected from the old one. But the old url's alexa ranking is continuing to increase while the new one is not moving.
I have recently made a 301 redirect for one of my website to change its domain. In the beginning of the process the pages of new domain were replaced by their corresponding pages in the old domain in the search engine ranking but few days ago suddenly all my new pages lost their ranking and seems to be my site is penalized altough am quite sure that i have not violated any of the webmaster guidlines and my search engine rankings for the previous domain are the evidence of that.. the same happens with me few ago also when i made a 301 redirect for my another web which has been penalized also.. Please guide me in this regard. My website are on ASP.
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We are redesigning our website
WWICSCould you please help us how can we redesign without losing our Page Rank?
Is there a way to do this when switching from blogger to wp?
I need some help with figuring out how to avoid duplicate content. Here is what I have:
1. New Wordpress self-hosted blog at a new url. Contains more than half of the posts from 2. Currently blocked from Google indexing.
2. Live Blogger blog with a few inbound links. I will delete the majority of the posts on here and manually redirect the few of the transferred posts which have inbound links.
Here are my questions:
1. How do I find all the Blogger posts with Google inbound links?
2. How do I manually redirect individual blog posts from Blogger to the new domain?
3. Do I need to wait after deleting the Blogger posts before releasing my Wordpress blog to be indexed by Google in order to avoid duplicates? If so, how do I know when it is safe to release?
Hi I have recently moved domains from a well established domain (9 years of use) to a new domain. The reasons for the move are business related enabling further expansion etc...
I researched and followed Google's and other experts guidelines to the letter, however I must say after 13 days since moving domain I am getting very very nervous.
The old domain used to sit in no2 position on many keyword searches and now since the move and notrifying Google that the move has taken place (301 redirects + sitemap submission etc...) I have lost pretty much all rankings. I have sent an email to Google for consideration, but now waiting to see what happens.
The business that I run relies on the Google traffic so waiting to see how long this takes.
The reason for writing this is to 1. see if anyone has any advice on how long and 2. if anyone is looking at doing this move be careful as it won't be smooth from a rankings position point of view.
Hi, this is a great info. I just transferred my blogspot URL to my new domain. It was successful. What else do I need to do about it?
Alison Kerr,
What yu have to do first is publish the Blogger blog to a subdomain or subfolder on yru current website, by FTP.
At this point Blogger will appluy 301 redirectins to yuor blog's pages to the new domain.
Then you can clean it up and 301 redirect yourself whatever pages you want from the blogger blog that's been already published to your site, to the corresponding pages on the new WP blog on your site.
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