SEOMOZ Crawl Test

[kellymandingo]

Guys

I really have an issue that i know have but cannot see if that makes sense.

Basically 3 months ago i did a site wide 301 from economyleasinguk.co.uk to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk

Every thing looks good get all the correct header responses , all canonicals work perfectly , Google webmaster tools is updated fetch as google bot shows the old site is 301

I tried the seomoz crawl test today on the old domain and got this message

Oh no! Looks like the page you were trying to access is temporarily down

which at first thought ok because the site was not there it wont do it on an old 301 domain, however i tried it on a domain i know has just been 301'd and i got this message

The URL http://www.site1.com/ redirects to http://site2.com/. Do you want to crawl http://site2.com/ instead?
Would you like to:
Continue with www.site1.com
Continue with site2.com

I really do not know what to do, its either the redirect script is missing something however its doing what it should or the server is a problem but again its doing what it should so why would SEOMOZ not be able to crawl the old URL like it example site above.

Now the strange thing is Open Site Explorer does see the 301 and asks if i want to check the new URL instead

Ps the redirect is done using PHP redirect which i am asking him to change to a htaccess as its now on a apache server and was wondering if this could be an issue, all pages go to correct pages as requested

Thanks in Advance

[RobertFisher]

Kelly, 
First, you state: Basically 3 months ago i did a site wide 301 from economyleasinguk.co.uk to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk

By a sitewide 301 do you mean you simply redirected the domain (meaning one 301 of  domain economyleasinguk.co.uk only to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk only)?

Next, when using OSE and you get the "abc.com redirects to www.abc.com we're showing links to www.abc.com to provide more accurate metrics... That can be from the preferred domain you set in GWMT or the .htaccess file so is likely not a factor in this.

When you do a site wide 301 it must be url to url: abc.com/ to a-b-c.com/ and abc.com/hot-deals to a-b-c.com/todays-sales, or abc.com/our-locations to a-b-c.com/our locations. Otherwise you are wasting all the link juice from the old site. This must be done in the .htaccess file.

To test this- OK I just did and you did it incorrectly and need to back up. When it says "do you want to see the results for economyleasinguk.co.uk instead click on that link for economyleasinguk.co.uk. When you arrive on the page, you have only one result from a site with a domain authority of 50 and that home page has a PA of 40.

I am guessing it was fairly close to those numbers prior to the 301. after three months, a lot should have moved to you. I looked at a cache of the new site and it goes to 2010 so I am assuming it was up when you did redirect and had been up for a while. The DA of the new site is 38 and home page PA is 39 so I would have expected that from a site up a couple of years. You don't appear to be getting much help from the redirect.

So, go back in and go url to url and make it work for you.

Let us know if there are other issues - great question as this happens to us all!

[wrttnwrd]

I'd need to see the PHP redirect code. But in CURL it all looks OK.

Make 100% sure that your PHP code is set up with the lower case 'header' command, like this:

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.site.com"); ?>

Hope this helps.

[kellymandingo]

Hi Robert

Many thanks for taking the time to answer

It was just a domain name change

What we did was a URL Change where all the relevant URLS got to their new names in just a couple of lines of code Like in Ians example, I cant post the code yet as its the weekend and my developer is not working

You state i should have done this URL to URL however the sites has 17k pages

I Know In Open site explorer it sees the 301 however when you use the crawl test tool it does not and this is what maid me ask this question again and its that which bothers me the most

My site prior had a DA of 68 and PA of 62 (but even if you check the pages in Google Pr for the home page is showing 1 where it used to be 4 but the inner pages are between 2 and 3 so it just seems the home page is suffering

[RobertFisher]

Fortunately or unfortunately, it is 0400 here in Houston. Fortunately, our web dev magnificent & company VP is still asleep, but works like me (a bit much). I sent an email for the code that will help. He will rise in a couple of hours and see email and direct us. When he does i will send to see if it helps.

Hopefully, we will find the magic juice retriever.

Best,

[kellymandingo]

Wow

That's really kind of you, i have trouble getting hold of my developer on the weekend so good luck

Many thanks again for your help

[kellymandingo]

I will get you a version of the 301 As soon as i can to see

Me and my developer had a debate whilst doing this and as he is the expert he kind of won but i still question his thinking

What he did was only send over clean URL's from the old site he insisted on sorting out the canonicalization of the URL along with lower and upper case before the URL was sent so in theory on both servers you have a 301 , we know they are not chaining but if the new site has a 301 capable of resolving any bad URL's that come our way , why have it on both

I wanted just the minimum with less chance for anything to go wrong

If you were doing a name change for a site would you do as Robert Fisher suggests above and do this on a URL to URL basis or would you just do the header response 301 as in your example.

as i do see the benefit in both, but just really need this fixing as business is at an all time low right now

[RobertFisher]

Kelly

Here is the code per our dev:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$

RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This should assist you in getting it done correctly.

He also suggested that the PHP is not the way to go and it does not handle the url to url. So, there you have it.

Best

[kellymandingo]

Thanks Robert

Thats just a straight forward htaccess 301, makes sense to keep it simple

Again thank you for taking the time in getting back to me

[RobertFisher]

Kelly

Happy to help, but there are strings attached...No, you don't have to let me use the Maserati for a week next time I'm in town...

Before you put the change in effect, please run a measure of all DA/PA for both sites and date it. Then, weekly at least, rerun looking at both. Remember, you will be ask do you want to see the other url so you can still see both even though you have the redirects in place. 
Then, you will get a great view of the change over time and can track the effect which, whenever you see a similar question on moz you can refer back to.

If you chose to share that data with me, I promise to use the data anonymously and never share what site/sites or page/pages it was from. No plans to publish it in any way as of now, just started tracking sites with 301's about a year ago and like having some that we are not associated with other than tangentially.

Thanks, but no worries if you don't want to share, I understand.

Best

[kellymandingo]

Im sure i can do that for you, especially if your doing it for the good of education and science ..

If you mail me through the site your mail address ill let you have the analytic s too, so as you can see the visitors and the improvements and if all works well it should be a good graph as im currently around 60-70% short of what i had before

This is assuming that what i have already is actually wrong but would make a great topic for some

[kellymandingo]

Hi Robert

Htaccess uploaded, however the code you provided i think was relying on the sites sitting on the same I.P where in fact they are on different servers with different a I.P

so only the bottom line was needed , if we put your code up all looked good but some tools reported 403

Site explorer and site crawler now see the site as 301. so fingers crossed

Just need google to visit the old site and see the change and its not been there for ages , ill just ping it and add it to twitter or something