Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
-
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company.
They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content.
Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session.
Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo).
They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this.
My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions.
These are the things we've identified:
-
All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it.
-
Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s.
-
Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years.
-
Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301.
-
Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema.
-
Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now.
Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
-
-
Facing the same issue. Is there any tutorial or guide that can solve this issue.
-
this is starange everyone face same issue like me. does anyone out there have a step by step guide?
-
This is strange everyone is facing this problem like me anyone find out the guide yet?
-
Does anyone out there have a step by step guide on this?
-
I have the same que which I asked the main queue. I have a website on black german shepherd and facing the same issue.
-
I have the same question which is asked in the main question.. I have e-commerce website name is best hoverboard and facing the same problem.
-
Hi, I am also facing a similar issue. Do let me know as well if you find out any helpful guide.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My site Metrics are not as per they should
Hi, I am regularly making links on my site to improve its metrics but i am confused how other people fastly improve their DA/PA and my DA/PA is not improving with that site. The same happened with spam score. It has been a month i disavow my links having spam score but instead of decrease in it, my spam score increased. Please advice. Is there any special way to use that help moz crawler to check site and update accordingly? Please help
Technical SEO | | AzadSeo37310 -
Messy older site
I am taking over a website that doesn't have any canonical tags and spotty redirects. It looks like they have http://, https://, www and non-www pages indexed but GA is just set up for the http://non-www home page. Should all versions of the site be set up in GA and Search Console? I think so but wanted to confirm. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | SpodekandCo0 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Old Product Pages
Hi Issue: I have old versions of a product page in the Google index for a product that I still carry. Why: The URLs were changed when we updated this product page a few years ago. There are four different URLs for this product -- no duplicate content issues b/c we updated the product info, Title tags, etc. So I have a few pages indexed by Google for a particular product. Including a current, up-to-date page. The old pages don't get any traffic, but if I type in google search: "product name" site:store.com then all of the versions of this page appear. The old pages don't have any links to them, only one has any PA, and as I said they don't get any traffic, and the current page is around #8 in google for its keyword. Question: Do these old pages need 301 redirects, should I ask google to remove the old URLs? It seems like Google picks the right version of this page for this keyword query, is it possible that the existence of these other pages (that are not nearly as optimized for the keyword) drag it down a bit in the results? Thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
What do the mozzers think about this site of mine?
Hello SEO MOzzers, I am today wanting your feedback on a site that I recently went live with. My Google rankings for the main keywords are doing very well considering the site has been live for 3 weeks now. I of course have a list of items that i'm still working on, completing meta description tags, title tags, adding copy content to category pages, updating h1 tags, working on our backlinking campaign, etc. The site is www.profitness-supplies.com Let me know what you think Mozzers
Technical SEO | | seohive-2227200 -
New project old domain should I 301 redirect while new sites built
I just took on a larger scale e-commerce project and came across a tricky road block that I need some advise on. Ok I'm building the site from scratch and due to it's complexity it may take 3-4 months before I have it designed and coded. The client has a domain name that has some decent page/domain authority and I would hate to loose that while the sites being built. Currently I have nothing to display as his previous site got hacked and it was deleted by the previous web admin. Being that a blog has already been approved as part of the project I already installed wordpress to keep the domain fresh however here's the issue, I installed wordpress in a folder called blog and debating if I should 301 redirect or 302 redirect his index here? The blog will always reside in the blog folder even after launch. Will performing a 301 redirect pull all the juice away from my index page? I'm assuming yes. IF so what would occur once the project is complete and I make the ecommerce site live in the index page? Thanks in Advance! Mike
Technical SEO | | MikeDelaCruz770 -
Old Domain - What to do?
A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements. Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website. I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages). If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.
Technical SEO | | MountainMedia0 -
Google and QnA sites
My website has a QnA site - a bit like this one except it's not private to premium members. It is a page with a left colomn for category links and it has a list of recently asked questions, each question is a link to view the full question and answers etc. Does google know this is a QnA ? Or will it say - hey, there are far too many links on this page, tut tut. Is there anything I can do to help it understand what the page is.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0