Ask HN: Why does Google hate us? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does Google hate us?

20 pointsakmiller16 comments

We recently switched our site over to a new domain for branding reasons. Before the change we had roughly 200,000 pages in the google index.

For the rollover we submitted a new xml sitemap, set up 301's, and submitted a change of address with GWMT's.

Using GWMT's we can see that our site is consistently being crawled and that the top keywords have been extracted. It also shows that our robots.txt file is working as intended.

1 month later we still see none of our pages in the index with our new .com domain. We have other global domains (such as .cn, .de) that use the same code base and have successfully been indexed (with the same procedures above).

Has anyone else been through a similar situation? Are .com's treated different by google? Does anyone have advice for figuring out why this is happening?

edit: As a follow-up we did follow Matt Cutts guide as all of our 301's had a 1 to 1 url mapping to the new domain name. The domain itself we have owned for a couple of years, but it just was put into use recently with our Company name change.

There is a step by step procedure on the blog of Matt Cutts about moving your site to a new web host/server.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/

That doesn't really apply because the article assumes you are using the domain name.

I go with the assumption that the "1 to 1 mapping" you were talking about is a global 301 redirect on a wild-card page by page basis, right?

Example: oldsite.com/anypage.extension redirects to: newsite.com/anypage.extension

If that's the case, you've done everything correctly. The only other thing I may think of is your new site being on the same IP of a "bad site" in Google's eyes, but that's very unlikely.

It takes a while for Google to re-index all of its URL's, it may take 6-9 months for you to recover your organic search traffic you once had. I remember working for WashingtonPost.com as their SEO manager when one of their properties switched from budgettravelonline.com to budgettravel.com a few years ago, it took forever, but they had 20,000+ URL's

I go with the assumption that your homepage is indexed by Google, but the internal pages are taking its time switching from old URL to new URL in Google indexes? If you don't know, you can either look at it in Google's webmaster tools, or do a simple search on "site:yoursite.com" as query.

I know this isn't easy, but sit tight and wait. Good luck.

The process as you describe worked for me.

I moved from londonfgss.com to lfgss.com (as the users called it that anyway and it's nice and short for twitter URLs and for mobile entry).

Before the move I had 600,000 URLs indexed, 1 month after only 100,000 URLs, 3 months after 600,000 and 6 months later I now have over 1,000,000 URLs indexed.

The only thing that has happened is the pagerank hasn't apparently come over. But this is probably just the pagerank indicator rather than an actual loss of pagerank.

The 301's, the GWMT change, the 1 to 1 mapping... all worked really well.

That's just my experience, but anecdotally (for you) it does work.

Do you remember how long it took before you started seeing the links with the new domain appear in Google?

That was almost immediate. The quantity was lower but it was less than a week for the new domain to be returned by Google.

It might be that you are ranking lower because you no longer have to keyword "london" in your domain name and the age of you new domain is probably younger.

If your site is being properly found by real people with Google, then does it matter if the search results page doesn't show the .com yet? My assumption is that anybody who wants to share your URL with somebody will do it after they've arrived at your page (as opposed to writing down the URL displayed on the SERP). The big issue with switching domains is making sure your pages can still be found, which it sounds like they are.

If you think you did everything correctly and followed all of Google's webmaster guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=...

You should mention the what the old and new urls are, that would make it easier for people to help you.

One common mistake is to robot out the 301 source, therefore making it impossible for Google to see that it's a redirect. Are you sure you're not doing that?

What's the domain? It's near-impossible to tell form the information given.

It depends on exacly how your transfer went.

Is is on a new server, was the new domain used before you, did it have backlins, was the 301 setup correctly, how did you check it afterwards?

Also, could be duplicate content issues with the international TLD's, how old is the new domain, any tricky browser sniffing going on...

Feel free to hit me up on twitter (@garrettgillas) if you want help on anything specific.

Our business deals with content that is regional so each domain deals with data that is available only in that region. Therefore we have no duplicate data amongst the different domains. We've tried very hard to always walk a straight line regarding how are site is viewed by the search engines.

It sounds like you did everything correctly but that just one minor detail is off. I hate it when that happens.

Either way, I would have a fairly knowledgeable SEO colleague take a second look at it just to make sure nothing is missed.

A month should be more than enough time but you can try setting up some new links (from new sources) to the new domain just to see if the issue is that the new site is just being really slow on getting indexed for some reason.

The servers are the same with the same IP's. We had back-links and they are slowly migrating to our new domain.

The 301's are working correctly as we've checked with a few different tools to verify. We can click on our old links in google and verify that the page comes up to the redirected domain.

The thing that really strikes us as odd is how quickly the other domains appeared but our main domain at .com has still not shown up.

This is very concerning since there is essentially nobody to follow-up with at Google.

I should also mention that Yahoo and Bing have picked up the change just fine.

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