301 redirects

[aidanfitz]

About 2 months ago i redirected my site www.rentacar-worldwide.com to www.novacarhire.com for branding purposes. The former had a Pagerank of 5 and had a few hundred backlinks. I also had some rentacar-countryspecific sites with pr's of 4 and backlinks which i also redirected to novacarhire.com(Country specific pages )
The problem is that 2 months later, Google still shows 0 backlinks and a pr of 2 which the site had before the redirect.
Can anyone give me some advice? I thought link value/pr was passed on after about 3 weeks.

[ste_dean]

Hi,

I have looked at your redirect and it is working correctly and throwing the permenantly moved 301 header.

However, the age of your domains could be the reason why you arent getting the old PR and backlinks. Your site could be (Havent checked) sandboxed by Google. It has been known that redirecting to a newer domain can put your website in the sandbox!!

www.novacarhire.com - 1 year 11 months
www.rentacar-worldwide.com - 6 years 11 months

My money would be on that!

Getting out of the sandbox can take several months and there is no gaurenteed way of doing it...but there are a few things you can try!

[aidanfitz]

Thanks for your reply. The site is ranking for some terms, although many pages down so i dont think it is in the sandbox.

Do you mean that Google just holds back pagerank and link value until after a certain period of time?

[ste_dean]

I may have been a bit previous when mentioning the sandbox, ive just run a few checks and it would seem things arent that bad.

Ignoring PageRank which has little importence in ranking and traffic, have your actual visitor figures plumeted?

Has the traffic from Google gone up or down?

[aidanfitz]

Its just that when i had the rentacar-countryspecific sites, traffic and bookings were almost 3 times what they are now.

The problem stems from the fact that the rentacar sites had always ranked and since the redirect the new site novacarhire has not. The redirect occured at the start of July and i know that many sites had their pr and links passed over in a couple of weeks.