Why has google stopped showing one domain and switching to showing another that points to the same website?
-
My client has a website here: http://www.savannahchiropractic.com/
The site ranked really well for searches for the term "savannah chiroprtactor".
Sometime last week (April 21 mobilegeddon?) the site slipped in rankings, but reappeared under the domain name: "www.whitemarshchiropractic.com"
Both URLs go to the exact same site. and I don't even think that the whitemarshchripractic.com site is a redirect. I'm not sure how it's setup, but it's definitely not a duplicate site. The ranking is still lower than the savannahchiropractic.com site, but now appears.
Anyone have any insights on this?
-
I agree with Patrick and dirk, you making trouble for yourself.
Decide what domain you want and 301 redirect to it. Use the logic, if not prefereddomain, then perfereddomain, rather then trying to detect evey domain.
-
Hi,
Don't really understand your remark "it's definitely not a duplicate site" - according to me it is exactly that.
Set-up seems to be quite straightforward: both domain names point to the same server which is a classical case of duplicate content. The domains both are registered by the same company (I guess your client who probably forgot the existence of the old domain) - so all the content is available on both domains
What you should do is to choose a principal site & redirect the other domain with 301 to the main domain which should solve the issue.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Adam
First, this is a heavy duplicate content issue - you have two sites with the same content. I would do the following (if this were my site):
-
Choose a domain to focus on
-
For all sites...
-
Check backlinks in Majestic
-
Check metrics in Open Site Explorer
-
Check rankings in SEMRush and Google Webmaster Tools
-
Redirect the other domain to this new domain
-
Here is a URL mapping resource from Google
-
Find any and all other domains you may have
-
Use Copyscape
-
Redirect those domains as well
-
Do a backlink audit on all of the domains
-
Keep and change backlinks you want
-
Request removal of links you don't
-
If any domain has a bad enough backlink profile, you may want to 404 the site, or 410 it
-
You may need professional assistance on this so don't do that without second opinions
-
Update your sitemap for the chosen domain
-
Update your new sitemap XML in Google WMT and Bing WMT
-
If other sites have a Google Webmaster Tools, look into into a change of address
-
Correct any and all internal links to reflect this new domain
-
I recommend using relative URLs
-
Local search, Google+, & citations
-
Conduct a Local Search audit
-
Update citations - utilize Moz Local or Whitespark
-
Make sure information submitted reflects chosen domain
-
Update your Google+ Business pages
-
Make sure all NAP information is up to date
-
Make sure linked domain is correct
I would also take a look at your on-site SEO. A lot of these sites seem heavily optimized and a little spammy at points. While you are ranking now your URLs could set off spam filters, coupled with the on-site work that needs to be done, as well.
Just be mindful of your content and optimization going forward. There is a lot here, and without telling you what to do because I do not know your site at all (I would bring in a professional to help you and give you a strategy), these are areas and things I would start looking into. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Hope some of this helps - good luck!
-
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
-
Landing pages showing up as HTTPS when we haven't made the switch
Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Old domain to new domain
Hi, A website on server A is no longer required. The owner has redirected some URLS of this website (via plugin) to his new website on server B -but not all URLS. So when I use COMMAND site:website A , I see a mixture of redirected URLS and not redirected URLS.Therefore two websites are still being indexed in some form and causing duplication. However, weirdly when I crawl with Screaming Frog I only see one URL which is 301 redirected to the new website. I would have thought I'd see lots of URLs which hadn't been redirected. How come it is different to using the site:command? Anyway, how do I move to the new website completely without the old one being indexed anymore. I thought I knew this but have read so many blogs I've confused myself! Should I: Redirect all URLS via the HTACESS file on old website on server A? There are lots of pages indexed so a lot of URLs. What if I miss some? or Point the old domain via DNS to server B and do the redirects in website B HTaccess file? This seems more sensible but does this method still retain the website rankings? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website0 -
Redirecting a Few URLS from One Domain to Another
Hello, I have two websites within a similar niche...some of the top organic traffic driving pages on Website B I'd like to redirect to a similar page on Website A. The reason is Website A is a bigger and better and is monetized much better as well. I only want to redirect a few of the main URLS on Website A and also only those that I have similar content on my main Website B. Is this process safe for SEO? What is the best way to go about this process. I am not really concerned with Website B and what happens to it's rankings, but in the meantime, I'd like to redirect the traffic from some of it's main organic traffic driving pages to my main website A and to it's similar pages. I am also concerned with making sure my main website A stays white hat and doesn't receive any negativity from these redirects. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Google webmaster showing 0 indexed, yet I can see them all them Google search?
I can see them all the pages showing up in Google when i search for my site. But in webmaster tools under the sitemaps section in the indexed pages - the red bar is showing 0 indexed pages, even though they seem to be indexed. Any idea why is this showing like this? I don’t really think it’s that important as the pages are still indexed, but it just seems odd. Please see in the image.
Technical SEO | | Perfect0070 -
Any one worked on a sites.google.com/ website ?
Hi I have a client that has a sites.google.com/ website, Has anyone ever used one ? or had to do SEO on one ? Any help would be very much appreciated Thanks
Technical SEO | | tempowebdesign0 -
Duplicate content on the one domain (related to country targetting)
Hi - We have a client who has a TLD that they wish to target several markets using .com/au .com/us .com/sg Each will use duplicate content with slight variations to cater for the local market (spelling, industry jargon). They seem reluctant to register a TLD for each target market (which was our suggestion) and I am wondering what SEO penalties would apply for having a majority of duplicate content on the same domain – perhaps using subdomains would be better? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | E2E0 -
Has google panelized us ? If so, why ? How do I know if our website is panelized ?
We were ranked on first page among top 5 position a year ago for most of our pages. On one fine day, google decided to drop us from the results although google keeps indexing our pages. Google index our pages regularly but doesn't show them in its results. All google traffic we receive is for our own site name and its variations. I wanted to know - how do we know if google has panelized us. Why has google panelized us ? If they have panelized us, what can we do to get out of it ? Also I wanted to know if any tool will help me identify such thing. We have not done any link building. Our site page rank is 4 (it was 5 few months ago). All we did was on page optimization. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | seoidea0