Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain

[AdamThompson]

Google is not going to index http://www.websitebuildersworld.com, because it redirects to http://www.websiteplanet.com. Google won't index a domain that redirects to another domain. It will index the domain where the content is hosted.

[Ouzan]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your reply, but it wasn't really my question I afraid.

The thing is that I wonder if google will index back all our results and put them back in their spots and just redirect to the new domain.

Thanks,
Eliran.

[AdamThompson]

Oh, OK. Then I would say: yes, you should regain your rankings, though it's possible it will take time. Some SEOs have reported it takes several months to regain their rankings after switching domains, but I personally have not had that issue.

[Ouzan]

The thing is that I didn't 'give' google the chance to index the website again with the old domain after I fixed the noindex,nofollow.

Quite hard to explain, but do you get what I mean?

[AdamThompson]

I think I understand. Since your site was de-indexed, Google has to start over indexing your site on the new domain. This is what should happen:

Google will follow any external links it finds pointing to your site, will find the 301 redirect, and will follow that to your new site. Google will then crawl your new domain. Google will "forward" most of the link juice from your backlinks to your new domain.

Via your internal link structure, the forwarded PageRank will be spread throughout your site. This will hopefully result in you regaining the rankings you previously had.

I assume you have forwarded each subpage on the old domain to the same page on the new domain?

I would also:

a) if you can, change over at least some of your backlinks to point to your new domain

b) build/attract links to your new domain

[josh-riley]

I think I get what you mean and this stuff can get a bit tricky - first and foremost, it can take days/weeks/months to get things unclogged after an issue like this and there's no promise you'll get exactly the same ranking as you had before.

Getting back to your original question, and not to kick you when you are down, however, Google never recommends moving an entire site at once because you don't catch major things like this. Now, to your question, here's answer: "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied." I think that's what you are trying to get at?

There's more info here that may be worth you reading through:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

[Ouzan]

Hi Adam,

Yes this is what I thought.
But I also had a weird thought that maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?

As for a' and b' yes I will do that.

[AdamThompson]

"maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?"

I'm not 100% certain, but I can't think of any reason you would need to do that.

[Ouzan]

The reason that comes up to my mind is that basically I didn't let google see WebsiteBuildersWorld.com without the noindex,nofollow removal fix so he wouldn't know what to redirect or something like that because the last time he visited websitebuilderworld.com he saw noindex,nofollow and now he can't visit it anymore because he is being redirected to websiteplanet.com

[Ouzan]

Hi **Andrea,
Thanks for your reply. **

I have no worries about google getting me back to my rankings, I am sure he will.

The main problem is as you quoted:  "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied."

Are you suggesting that I need to put websitebuildersworld.com domain backup and let google re-crawl it and only then redirect it?

Thanks,
Eliran.

[josh-riley]

Here's the concept at its core: how can Google crawl redirects and index new pages if it can't crawl those redirects to get to the new pages and process the 301s?

Fix that to fix your problem. The link I shared has a lot of good comments very centered on this general topic.

And, I am intentionally avoiding giving an absolute solution to you because, quite frankly, I don't know enough or am involved at all in your site to feel comfortable doing so. Strategically, I'm happy to share ideas/best practices.

[Ouzan]

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your replies.

I decided to retrieve the old domain and do 302 redirect from the new domain to the old one.

I will let google index the old one completely once again and only then i will do 301.

Would love to hear what you think about that.

Thanks,
Eliran.