Parked former company's url on top of my existing url and that URL is showing in SERPs for my top keywords
-
I have the URL from my former company parked on top of my existing URL. My top keywords are showing up with the old URL attached to the metadsecription of my existing URL. It was supposed to be 301 redirected instead of parked but my web developer insists this was the right way to do it and it will work itself out after google indexes the old URL out of existence. Are there any other options?
-
Thanks, again. Will try these options today. It'll be nice going in more knowledgeable so it's a very good thing you do Mr. Kley.
-
Nothing he can do? Lmao what a terrible answer. On the old site, you should still have Ftp setup. In that account, go into your htaccess file and add the rule that redirects all traffic to your existing domain, or the one you want to get indexed. Also add a robots rule denying any access to the old domain ftp.
Option 2 is to delete any and all old site files in the domain Ftp you want to get rid of, have the site urls return a 404 error, and do a url removal request in webmaster tools. Option 1 would be safer imo, but doing option 2 will get rid of the old domain for good.
-
Thank you both for your responses.
@DavidKley, They do both show up and the developer says there's nothing more he can do since the old site no longer exists. Everything I've read online seems to contradict his though.
The domains in question are:
old - www.aceystowing.com
new - www.jonnystowingnow.com
Any further insight would again be greatly appreciated.
-
Just wanted to add:
Do both urls show up for a page? Meaning if you had a page about dog treats, can that page be accessed through both urls on the Web (manually or in serp results)? If so, you need to redirect the domain you don't want to use immediately to prevent duplications. Just parking one on top of the other usually will not take care of replacing the other url. You don't want to have both indexed at the same time.
-
In addition to parking the domain, did you add a parked domain htaccess rule? In addition to search engines, make sure your visitors are getting to the right place, without duplicate content.
After a while, all the new urls should replace the old ones, but I have seen this process take up to 6-8 months.
-
The definition of words like "parked" can vary in the FAQ documents of one hosting company to another. When I have moved domains I have "parked" them on my hosting and then 301 redirected specific old URLs on the old domain to specific URLs on the new domain.
There are a lot of really competent people out there, but sometimes webdevelpers have a "mechanical knowledge" of how things work but for search engines to treat your domain perfectly something else is required.
If this was my site I would have a technical SEO look at it. I've done this stuff for myself but always paid someone else to review my plan and check to see if it is workin' properly.
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
Pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. The page below in search console shows the error above...
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
My company bought another company. How long do I keep the purchased company's site live?
How long do I wait before redirecting the purchased company's webpages to the equivalent pages on our site? Do I need to keep some sort of announcement about the merger live on their website for a while first?
Technical SEO | | movingbusinessestothecloud0 -
Duplicate Content - What's the best bad idea?
Hi all, I have 1000s of products where the product description is very technical and extremely hard to rewrite or create an unique one. I'll probably will have to use the contend provided by the brands, which can already be found in dozens of other sites. My options are: Use the Google on/off tags "don't index
Technical SEO | | Carlos-R
" Put the content in an image Are there any other options? We'd always write our own unique copy to go with the technical bit. Cheers0 -
Just read Travis Loncar's YouMoz post and I have a question about Pagination
This was a brilliant post. I have a question about Pagination on sites that are opting to use Google Custom Search. Here is an example of a search results page from one of the sites I work on: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman I notice in the source code of sequential pages that the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags are not used. I also noticed that the URL does not change when clicking on the numbers for the subsequent pages of the search results. Also, the canonical tag of every subsequent page looks like this: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? All of our Google Custom Search pages have the same canonical tag....Something's telling me this just can't be good. Questions: 1. Is this creating a duplicate content issue? 2. If we need to include rel="prev" and rel="next" on Google Custom Search pages as well as make the canonical tag accurate, what is the best way to implement this? Given that searchers type in such a huge range of search terms, it seems that the canonical tags would have to be somehow dynamically generated. Or, (best case scenario!) am I completely over-thinking this and it just doesn't matter on dynamically driven search results pages? Thanks in advance for any comments, help, etc.
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Intuit's Homestead web developer
I used Intuit's homestead to develop my website and when I analyze my site on semoz, I get duplicate page content between the site and the "index". Is this something to worry about and can I fix it if it is? Thanks. Michael
Technical SEO | | thompsoncpa0 -
Negative effect on google SEO with 301's?
Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info - into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content. Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them. Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective. Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think? Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Google WMT shows sitemap.xml highest ranked for one main keyword
Hello, I am seeing my sitemap.xml show up in Google webmaster tools at the top for one of the main keywords for my site. This is in the Your Site on the Web - Keywords section. The URLs of my site contain this keyword, which is why I figure it showed up. I'm curious if this should be a concern to me? I find it odd that the sitemap would show up in this way. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nux0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10