301 redirects broken - problems - please help!

[CommT]

Hi,

I have a bit of an issue...

Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year.

All well and good.

However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated.

Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+).

It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it?

Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Amelia

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Amelia

You shouldn't include a link to the XML sitemap - it lives off the domain and you can resubmit (or submit depending on if you haven't before) your sitemap XML to WMT and Bing WMT, so you will be fine there as far as them crawling it. You can also include it in the robots.txt.

Not telling you what to do here, but my thoughts would be to put the old URL back up and 301 redirect it to the new location. This will give crawlers the opportunity to catch that the old site is now the new site (especially if you have done a change of address in WMT) and also let them know on that new site homepage about the rebrand. This puts the old brand on the new brand's site in the content, thus creating association.

Unless I am missing something here, it's a matter of putting the old site back up, redirecting it, letting WMT know about the change of address (which you did), and allowing crawlers enough time to recognize that change, which it seems to already have done with your organic traffic boost.

Have you seen your organic traffic for the new site decrease at all?

Hope this helps and hope I understood what is happening here. Let me know if you have any more questions. Good luck!

[CommT]

Thank you. The 301s have been put back. I did wonder if I needed to do anything at all! (I'm a great believer in leaving well alone - why poke a wasp's nest if you don't need to lol)

Over the last month there has actually been a slight increase in organic traffic to the new website.

My concern is that some pages seem to have been removed from the index. Also (which I didn't say above) that impressions have gone down - however this could be seasonal rather than anything sinister.

Do you know of a tool that shows you which urls are in the index - aside from Google, I mean - something I can extract into a spreadsheet?

Thank you for helping me again today