My 301 Disaster

[glinted]

Recently I decided to change domain names for one of my established sites which had a .net domain as the .com belonged to someone else. Details on the domain name etc can be found on this old thread: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=347115

Since I carried out the change in early January I have still not got any of the new domain pages indexed.

The old domain remains in the google index but has dropped from over 9,000 pages to about 3,000.

I have 301'd the domain and all the pages to their parallel page on the new domain.

My traffic has dropped from 150 - 200 uniques a day to now below 50, 40 today and dropping daily.

Today I'm spending the rest of the day on writing some articles to place on my site and work on some other promotion methods that I hope might help Google to start picking up my new domain.

This is a real nightmare as it was my main income generating site, I don't know what to do and I ask that some experienced members here could give me some ideas on what I can do now, please!

[kyobul]

Hi, I'm probably not a big specialist but have already succesfully changed domaine name and got no harm concerning Google.
What I did was:
1. copy my website to the new domain
2. replace the content of all page in ancient domain by a metaredirect tag to the corresponding new domain page
3.change urls in the One & Only Google Sitemap I had

In result I did not loose anything and got duplicate references (diferent urls for same page) for some time. Once I got all new urls included, I erased old urls from Google sitemap and added nofollow, noindex tags.

[chowell]

Not to beat you down or anything, but I found a couple questionable issues w/ the site in only 5 minutes of looking...

You're currently on the same shared hosting as 495 other websites, including some similar to yours, adult sites, .info sites, etc.

Some examples:
couponcentral.info
allfreebies.info

Get your own IP address or server.

Oh, and what are you putting up syndicated articles for? They don't appear to be related to coupons, discounts, etc... just unrelated spammy article content to make it look like you add content to the website. Google is smart enough to see that.

[glinted]

hello chowell, your feedback is very welcome...

As for sharing the IP; I have been concerned with this in the past and have requested my own IP number from my host but I was told that I need to have a reason to have a new IP. From what I read the ARIN guidelines only allow for SSL, Name Servers and anonymous ftp.

I even shifted all my websites over to a VP Hosting account last year but that was a bad move, many of my websites went down for days due to problems with the setup and issues with the provider. So moved them all back to the shared hosting as my traffic on most sites had come to a halt due to the VPS issues. It was also taking up most of my time looking after them and correcting all the VPS problems, configuring the servers and much more. At least on Shared hosting I never had these problems although I was aware that it would be better to not be sharing my hosting with other websites I had no control over. I did mention to my current host that I would be interested in VPS hosting in the future if they can provide it setup like my current shared hosting is, they came back to me and said it could be done so I think it might be time I followed it up with them.

Although I do believe myself that IP sharing could be causing issues - discussions like this one though don't really support the claim that shared hosting is bad: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/32743.htm

I also entered my IP in this page and only found 178 websites plus I never did find my own domain listed there? although I do see some of my other sites listed: http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html

Do you have another url for website sharing?

as for "syndicated articles"

I was just trying to add some content to my website as there is really not a lot to write about when it comes to my websites sector "coupons, discounts" etc

Do you think I should pull all of my articles down and what should I do about content?

I'm sure you are on to something here and hope to hear more feedback....

kyobul, thanks for your reply, I wish mine had been that simple and I have 301 other websites on the past that were much easier, this has just turned out to be much more complicated for some reason.

[swirt]

I have 301'd the domain and all the pages to their parallel page on the new domain.

I think your 301 redirect is broken.

For example this:
http://www.bargaincat.net/coupons.as..._discount=auto
Does not return this
http://www.bargaincat.com/coupons.as..._discount=auto

Nor does this
http://www.bargaincat.net/sitemap.asp
return this
http://www.bargaincat.com/sitemap.asp

This is why your pages have suffered. The history and PR of the pages has not been transferred to the new pages so they are basically starting from scratch.

[glinted]

Hi swirt,

the old domain is actually "discountsaver.net" if you try any of those pages with that domain then they should all be redirected.

When I purchased BargainCat.com I also purchased BargainCat.net, BargainCat.info and BarginCat.com (notice the missing "a") and I have those on another server with just a home page 301 redirect. Should I be doing this some otherway as maybe this is causing problems as you pointed out if a person finds my url with the ones you showed? I could run them as domain alias on the same server but I did this earlier and had thought it was part of the problem so I moved them away and ran them as direct home page 301's

[swirt]

Sorry, I didn't catch the discountsaver part in the other thread.

Then it looks like you have bigger problems. None of your bargaincat.com pages have been indexed by google. Considering that Google shows record of at least 5 incoming links using link: but shows no pages using site: My bet would be on a ban. It is possible this could be due to the shared IP but I doubt it. (lots of sites share space with bad sites on a server and have no problems...but still it is possible) Google is usually a bit more sophisticated than that.

The discountsaver.net site is showing 1850 pages in the index but all of them except 1 are in the supplemental results and the caches date back to Dec 2006. So it may take a while for google to remove them... and even if it follows them it would normally take care of itself with the 301 redirect, but redirecting to a banned site doesn't do much good. Have any of the bargaincat.com pages ever shown up in the google index?

[glinted]

Yes that is what has worried me as well that not even one page shows up or has ever showed up in google for bargaincat.com although it has shown pages for bargaincat.net

I also have a few other sites on the same IP that are indexed by google, in fact even the old domain Discountsaver.net is on this ip.

It looks like Google is removing the Discountsaver.net pages each day as there were 9,000, then 3,000 a few days ago and now 1850 pages as you pointed out.

So just to clarify my answer to your question, No, none of the bargaincat.com pages have ever shown up in the google index.

What are my options now then... Should I contact Google and ask for reinclusion? Maybe they will just be not interested in my type of site anyway?

Maybe I could use bargaincat.net as the main domain name and 301 everything to that until bargaincat.com comes out of the sandbox?

I also see my domain was ran before as an affiliate site back in 2004 by someone else - it was online from 2002 until 2005 from looking at http://web.archive.org

[swirt]

It's really hard to say what one issue is causing the possible ban. It is definitely not an issue of sandbox. Sandbox if it exists at all is more an issue of pages not showing up well, it doesn't affect indexing. I see only one page indexed for the bargaincat.net so I do not think switching to that would be a great idea. Have you registered this site with Google's Webmaster tools? There may be some info revealed there so it is worth doing if you haven't. I would go through the site and clean up anything that might be against the terms of service Make sure you are not building links to any of the forwarded domains. While you are at it you may want to modrewrite your page urls to get rid of the ? to make them a little more search engine friendly. Then do a reinclusion request.

The other option would be to drop the forwarding of the dealsaver.net and restore the content to that site.

[glinted]

I think the ban maybe something to do with when I 301'd the site and Google has seen it as duplicate content although I maybe wrong.

bargaincat.net had several pages indexed by Google as soon as I registered it but that was when it was running as an alias domain (something you can do in the helm control panel) but I thought it might of been part of the reason the .com was not been indexed so I changed it to a home page 301. This is the reason no more pages are now indexed because they go to errors presently (which I will fix soon).

I actually got a couple of top rankings for bargaincat.net for the few pages that were indexed.

I really don't want to go back to my old domain name so I would not like that to be an option, I have rebranded the site now and want to go forward and not back. If I had the dot com I would have stayed with that.

I really would like to try using the bargaincat.net as the main domain for a few months and then try the dot com again later. Is there any reason I shouldn't?

I will also look at the other suggestions you offered swirt, thanks!