8 replies to this topic

[mrgoodfox]

About a year ago I forwarded the domain name BuyHookah.com to HookahLounge.net (301 redirected and through Webmaster Tools). Everything was fine and after a few months traffic fully recovered and even grew.

Three months ago I bought Hookah.org and moved HookahLounge.net and BuyHookah.com to the new domain. I've put an htaccess file in both domains with a 301 redirect to Hookah.org. I've also set the Webmaster Tools to forward those two domain names to Hookah.org.

After moving to the new domain name, I've lost much of my search engine traffic which I can't understand why. (First how can I figure out if Hookah.org domain was ever a penalized/blacklisted domain by search engines?) Also, there are still a large number of pages from HookahLounge.net and BuyHookah.com indexed on Google.

[jonbey]

Do not know .... but .....

I searched Google for site:HookahLounge.net and clicked a result and got a warning in Chrome:

This is probably not the site that you are looking for!
You attempted to reach www.hookahlounge.net, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as buyhookah.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of www.hookahlounge.net.
You should not proceed, especially if you have never seen this warning before for this site.

So I guess that the redirects are upsetting Google somehow or other.

[jonbey]

Also, is all the content yours? Some duplicate issues.

cigarrob.wordpress.com shares some of the same content.

[mrgoodfox]

I saw that too. I dont know why Google is giving that message.

All the content is mine. That website must be picking up our RSS and publishing it

[DonnaFontenot]

That warning has to do with the fact that the urls are https instead of http and the security certificate does not match the domain. Is there a reason that the hookahlounge.net was using https?

[EGOL]

Just two stories....

============================

I had a site on a key-word.com that was about one year old and redirected it after I acquired keyword.com.

Rankings SHOT UP! SHOT UP!

Did I say rankings SHOT UP?

===============

I had another key-word.com that was about ten years old and redirected it after I acquired keyword.com. (Key-word.com had held #1 for the exact match query for TEN YEARS) (keyword.com had been page full of ads all of that time)

After redirecting I lost #1 to a big brand.

Then... about six months later got it back by doing nothing.

Before redirecting.... key-word.com was getting a couple thousand domain queries per month. After the redirect it was getting ZERO. At about the six month mark the domain queries had recovered to about 2000/month.

Does this suggest that redirecting an established site is more risky than redirecting a nascent site ?

I don't know.

===========================

[bwelford]

Remember also that AFAIK a 301 redirect involves a percentage reduction in the PageRank flowing through. I cannot find a current reference for that but I seem to remember someone mentioning a 15% or so reduction

[TheAlex]

Two changes in less than a year could be seen as excessive by Google? Are there any 301 chains? I know that's frowned upon. Also, when I clicked the results for hookahlounge.net in Google, they go to the hookah.org homepage, when ideally they should 301 to the same article on the new website. That could be why Google is still listing them, as they haven't found a replacement.

[mrgoodfox]

Two changes in less than a year could be seen as excessive by Google? Are there any 301 chains? I know that's frowned upon. Also, when I clicked the results for hookahlounge.net in Google, they go to the hookah.org homepage, when ideally they should 301 to the same article on the new website. That could be why Google is still listing them, as they haven't found a replacement.

There are no 301 redirect chains. One other (perhaps) mistake I made was I changed the URL structure of the website to make the URLs shorter with fewer category drills. So that made it very hard to redirect every one of the old pages to every one of the new pages (10,000+ pages). I've tried to 301 redirect the most important pages though.

That warning has to do with the fact that the urls are https instead of http and the security certificate does not match the domain. Is there a reason that the hookahlounge.net was using https?

No reason for HookahLounge.net to have had a https URL. I'm not sure why they're appearing that way. Do you know how I can fix it?

Thank you guys