Hi folks,


I'm working as an eMarketing and Webdev person for a pretty big computer online store in Australia.

We've recently relaunched our website with a completely new design and a new domain. Since then, we're experiencing problems with our pages being not properly indexed in Google.

We had long discussions with our ecommerce-software provider as to who is to blaim for this problem. They insist that certain on-page SEO efforts done by myself prevents the website from being indexed properly. I insist that this has to do with a server setting and with the redirect from the old domain to the new one.

Please find detailed info on this case below. We are rewarding anyone who can identify/solve the problem with US$25 paid via PayPal.


_____


In January this year the old online shop at alphaonline.com.au went offline and we started with a new design and optimised website at alphastore.com.au. The pages seemed to have been indexed ok. For some reason in February/March the site was hit by lots of bots at the same time which caused our site to crash several times a day.

We advised our software company to have a look into it, who somehow changed server settings and tweaked the software so that it ran stable again.

Since then strange things have happened to our Google index.

The new website has about 40,000 pages in total.

The amount of indexed pages of the new domain alphaSTORE.com.au jumps up and down from 500 to 13,000 pages every few days - at the moment we are at around 9,000 pages.

The old domain alphaONLINE.com.au is being redirected (301 redirect) to the new one. Strangely though, the old domain still has 44,000 pages indexed. and this is now more than 4 months ago.

I don't believe it's an on-page issue but something with the redirect or with a server set-up.

Can someone confirm this? How can we get all the alphastore.com.au pages indexed? Do we need to get rid of alphaonline.com.au entirely?


Thanks for your help!

Kai Brach

Some addtional info I just found out:

What confuses me even more is that if I search for site:alphaONLINE.com.au (the old domain) i get results like this:

site:www.alphaonline.com.au - Google Search

those listings have a sessionID and are out of date. if you click on the "cache" link of those listings, you get to see the old page from August 2005. these pages were deleted from our server more than 6 months ago. how can Google still caches these pages? if you click on them you are redirected to the new domain - of course to an error page, because these pages no longer exist.?!?!

new domain = aging delay

4 months old = around 5 to 8 more to go (approximately)

your "Error" page returns a 301 for DEAD pages. If the pages are gone it should return a 404, by returning a 301 it tells the bots that the page still exists and should be indexed at the NEW URI so they will never be removed from the SE index.

'Fraid you have shot yourself in the foot from two angles there.

Are you getting your backlinks updated to the new domain?
Are you getting new links to the new domain?