301 Redirect

[Badapplemedia]

Hello,

• On the 26.2.13 we changed domain names having followed the guidance of both Matt Cutts Youtube videos and googles own online documentation.
• We have a 301 redirect in place from our old domain ukmotorhomehirerental.com to our new site leisurerentalsdirect.com on a page to page basis.
• The site structure has not been altered in anyway.
• Google has been informed of the change of address.

After the change the new domain transition was pretty seamless and ranked in the same postion in the SERPsThe one thing I've not done yet is tell all the webmasters who link to the old site that the address has changed (could this be it?)

[fablau]

How do you handle the 301 redirect from your old domain? I am unable to see the 301 redirect with Firefox Firebug.

[Badapplemedia]

Hello,

The 301 redirect is in the iirf.ini file in the root folder of the site ukmotorhomehirerental.com

The syntax in the re direct file is as follows...

#redirects ukmotorhomehirerental.com to the www version

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ukmotorhomehirerental.com$
RedirectRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ukmotorhomehirerental.com$1 [L,R=301]

#redirects ukmotorhomehirerental.com to leisurerentalsdirect.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.ukmotorhomehirerental.com/? [NC]
RedirectRule ^(.*)$ http://www.leisurerentalsdirect.com$1 [L,R=301]

Windows server running Ionic rewriter

Hope this may help...

Regards

James

[jesse-landry]

I'm only slightly familiar with IIRF (I also am on a IIS server so I have looked into this) but don't actually use it. Is there a chance it's just not functioning correctly?

Looking in OSE, are all of your links passing through to the new domain as you'd expect? Looking at something like ahrefs tool, do you see a sudden drop off of backlinks around the date the switch took place?

And last but not least, just to make sure, have you received any notifications in GWMT or are you comfortable with your link profile?

These questions might help get closer to an answer... Or somebody else might know better than I.

Good luck!

[Badapplemedia]

Hello,

Thank you for the response, to answer your questions...

1. The links have passed over ok
2. Their was know sudden drop in the linking
3. I've not received any messages in the GWMT
4. The PR has NOT PASSED OVER yet

However I have found 2 link exchange directories linking to the site, I'm about to Disavow these

One strange thing is that both SEOMOZ and GWMT say that ukmotorhomehirerental.com (the old domain) is linking to the new domain 1028 times???

[fablau]

Yes that's correct and sorry for the confusion: looks like Firefox Firebug doesn't detect 301 redirects properly. I have tested your old site redirect with:

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

and looks good! Now I will think about your drop of traffic...

[KaneJamison]

Hey James,

Seems like this may be troubling you still. I see 6000+ urls still indexed under the old domain.

A couple other things to try:

1. Make sure the domain is properly marked as changed in the Google Webmaster Tools backend.
2. Link reclamation (changing links from the old domain to the new one) is valuable and should be done, but the fact that you haven't done it yet won't stop the transfer process from working properly.

Let me know if you have other questions I can take a look.

[KaneJamison]

Pagerank won't register for a long time - 3-9 months over the past couple years is how long it takes to update the toolbar Pagerank.

Don't bother disavowing a couple links, that is likely not related unless you had issues with unnatural links prior to the domain migration.

Open Site Explorer will register 301 redirects as links - is that what you're referring to?