

Ask HN: Why does Google hate us? - akmiller

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.<p>For the rollover we submitted a new xml sitemap, set up 301's, and submitted a change of address with GWMT's.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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?<p>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.
======
sushi
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/>

~~~
pan69
That doesn't really apply because the article assumes you are using the domain
name.

------
PaulZhao
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.

------
buro9
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.

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

~~~
buro9
That was almost immediate. The quantity was lower but it was less than a week
for the new domain to be returned by Google.

------
foulmouthboy
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.

------
cristinacordova
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=...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1)

------
pfedor
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?

------
sjs382
What's the domain? It's near-impossible to tell form the information given.

------
garrettgillas
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?

~~~
garrettgillas
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.

~~~
akmiller
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.

~~~
garrettgillas
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.

