For the past two years I have done a site for a local community event, at event.co.uk . It has always ranked at the top of page 1 on search engine results (understandably, there is little competition). A couple of months ago, I discovered that event.org was also appearing in the results on Google, but not on Yahoo or Bing. However, the link redirected to the “official” domain at .co.uk. I have been unable to get any reply from the owner of the .org domain to find out what is going on here. Apparently he was involved with the event some years ago, and the domain registration seems to stem from that, as it was registered in 2002.
Today, I have discovered that the “official” domain no longer appears in Google’s search results at all. There are 22 pages on the site, several of which appeared previously on page one, but now there isn’t a single result in the first ten pages. Yahoo! and Bing still rank the site at the top of the results, but on Google, top place goes to the .org domain, which is redirecting to our home page. Other pages - including the event programme pages which have higher traffic and more inbound links than the home page - don’t feature anywhere. A site:domain search confirms all the pages are still indexed, and there are no problems showing in Google Webmaster Tools.
First question: Has Google decided that the other domain came first, because it was registered earlier, and is ignoring my site as duplicate content? That doesn’t make sense for the 21 pages not linked from the other domain. Nor does it make sense given that there is no actual content on .org - simply a redirect to .co.uk.
Second question: Is there anything I can do about it, if the owner of the second domain won’t reply to correspondence? If I block the IP for the .org domain, that will presumably stop “our” content showing under “his” domain, but will it change the way Google views the domains? I don’t want both domains to vanish from the results and leave the site unfindable.
Redirection from one legitimate domain to another is not “black hat”. It is a perfectly acceptable technique used widely on the web, which is why I don’t understand the problem with this instance.
Redirection is only a problem if its intention is to deceive the visitor, and in that case, I still wouldn’t call it “black hat” - I’d call it fraud.
When you say that the other site is redirecting to your site, is it a 301/302, meta refresh, a 100% frame or just a link saying “please click here…”?
What are the link profiles of the two sites like? Are most inbound links pointing to the “wrong” site? If so, you could try contacting the owners of those sites and asking them to update their links to the right site.
Are the pages on your site listed at all on Google? It might be worth submitting a reconsideration request.
If I enter www.event.org in the browser address bar, it takes me to www.event.co.uk. Clicking the link in Google results also takes me there. In Google results, event.org displays the first few lines of text from the event.co.uk home page, rather than the meta description text which appears in the event.co.uk results. Google shows a screenshot of the event.co.uk home page in the event.org results.
Difficult to say. If I search for links:event.org and links:event.co.uk, the first one does return more results, but checking those results shows that many of them do actually link to the correct (.co.uk) domain, not the .org domain. It says there are 4,350 results, so checking each one individually is not really an option. Where the results do point to the event.org domain, it is generally an archived page from 2003 or 2004; current pages all seem to be pointing to the correct domain.
Yes. As I mentioned in my first post, a site:event.co.uk search confirms all the pages are still indexed, and there are no problems reported in Google Webmaster Tools. A site:event.org search in Google only produces a single result, and site:event.org searches in Yahoo! and Bing produce no results at all.
Although a site:event.co.uk search returns all 22 pages, there seems to be no other way to get Google to show those results.
Even if I search for the exact page title e.g. Local Event - Programme for Particular Venue 2011, which is pretty specific and low in competition - it doesn’t feature in the results.
Similarly, if I do an image search, those on the home page show up, but attributed to event.org and those on subsequent pages don’t appear at all, even if searched for by their exact alt text.
I’m very concerned, because although this is a local event, it attracts visitors from around the world and is extremely important for tourism and the local economy. There is a great deal of information on that site, but it’s no longer showing up on Google.
I will try submitting a reconsideration request, as Stevie D suggested, but I’d really like to understand how and why this situation has arisen. I don’t want to find myself back in the same situation a few months down the road.
I submitted the reconsideration request, and according to Google, there are
no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google
which presumably means that whatever’s happening is a result of changes to their algorithm.
Google Webmaster Tools says my site is being crawled regularly, there are no crawl errors and it’s correctly reporting all pages, yet a search fails to produce any trace of my site, even if I search while logged into my Google account. This is one of only two sites I have which use Google +1 buttons. The main event programme page has received a number of +1s, but it still doesn’t feature anywhere. The home page has also received +1s, and it only shows up under the “wrong” domain. So much for +1.
So Google’s latest improvement to its results means 21 pages no longer appear, and the one that does is shown with the wrong domain, which is only a 302 redirect to my domain. Improvement? :mad:
[FONT=Verdana]Hi srini28 and welcome to the forums.
The good news is that my problem is resolved; the bad news is that I’m not sure how or why.
The event itself takes place in late May/early June, so there are major updates to the site from about March onwards. I noticed in April that the other pages had started to appear in the search results again, although the home page was still being indexed under the other domain. At some point in May, I noticed that the home page was at last showing under the correct domain. The other domain had been due for renewal in April, and it seems had not been renewed. So whether it was the other domain expiring, or whether it was the major site update, or whether Google changed an algorithm, I don’t know. Not very helpful, I’m afraid.[/FONT]
thanks Technobear. From your post, my inference is that the forwarding from the unwanted domain should be removed and that might resolve this issue. Will try and post an update here! Thanks again for your help.
Yes, I think that’s what you need to do. In my case, the person the other domain was registered to at first didn’t respond to correspondence, then claimed to have had nothing to do with the domain for years. That left us a bit stymied in terms of asking for the redirect to be removed. I did get suggestions on how to proceed in another thread, but fortunately the problem resolved itself. Do post back and let us know what happens. (And I still think there’s something ridiculous about Google’s algorithm if it’s showing results under a redirected domain, rather than the actual domain. ;))
Where the results do point to the 