Pagerank and 301s

[Resultify]

Hi all

For various reasons some of our pages were renamed from:

http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe

to:

http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo

We have made proper 301 redirects and also updated sitemap.xml accordingly. The change was done about 5th of September. The content on the pages remain identical.

This page, and all pages below it in the structure now get very low or no page-rank at all. Much lower than it was before the name change.

Any ideas to how long, if ever, it will take for Google to transfer the page-rank from the old page?

Any suggestions to what we can do to make the process faster?

[AlanMosley]

I changed domain names on a site and it took months to come back.

i would check to see if the pages have links, if the links are worth it, 301, if no links or crap links, just 404 it and start a new, 301 do not pass all link juice, they lose a bit each time, and it can get a management problem over time.

[RobertFisher]

When you say, "this page and the pages below it in the structure now get...," did you do a redirect for each of the urls that are below this? 
If you redirected this url only and then did not do the same to the pages below it, that is likely your problem. With a 301 you need to do every url that is involved individually.

We did a site a while back and did not do this and it simply was not ranking. After changing and doing each url where applicable, we were back within about 10 days.

As to the page rank of one to the other, the original /malmo had a PA of 25 with only one linking root domain (per OSE). I would think if you could add a few links from other root domains you would assist your effort quite well. But, the url to url is most important.

[Resultify]

We did proper 301s for all pages, the main page and all pages under this in the structure.

Your suggestion is to add a few links from other root domain to the new page url to speed things up?

[RobertFisher]

I don't know that it will quicken the pace, but it should improve either way since you only have one root domain.

I think if you did the changes to each url and were sure that a url of www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe was redirected to www...../malmo and www.meres..../malmoe/xyz went to www.meres...../malmo/xyz that you should not have long until you get the juice from the original. When I looked OSE, www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe shows the redirect to /malmo. Interestingly, the non www of meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe does not show the redirect and the non www of meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo doesn't either.

Could it be that you have not taken care of the canonical redirect and that is why you are not getting the juice? Have you done a 301 of non www to the www version via your .htaccess file? Have you also selected your preferred domain in Google?  If you haven't, do that and be sure that you choose the www. as your preferred (canonical) url since it already has the juice with it.

If you have done the urls each as their own 301 and you have set the 301's in the .htaccess file along with the "canonical redirect" you should be seeing results soon.

Be aware if you are using a CMS that if they state you can 301 through some plugin that you are better off doing it the old fashion way.

Good luck. Let me know when you start seeing a result.

[Resultify]

We have now added the preferred domain in Google.

I was a bit suspecting this but not sure. When I did a site:meresverige.dk i only get results with www.meresverige.dk so I thought Google had figured it out.

I will wait for a week or two more and see how it goes.

As for the redirects of the /malmoe to /malmo without the www i agree this is weird. It does not show in OSE at all. But when I use firebug I can see it redirects as it should. Have you seen this before?

Thanks again