Search Engine Marketing - changing our url

Hi All

I am having a major issue when it comes to redirected our pages to the new url. Back in June 2005, we changed our company url from http://www.callct.co.uk to http://www.cctonline.co.uk.

Since then I have been trying to find out a way to make sure our visitors are directed to the correct url. I have come across a few issues and I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction:

1) Some of our pages in Google come up as www.callct.co.uk and some come up as www.cctonline.co.uk. The pages appear under both url's, but Google only shows one or the other. Obviously, we would like it to appear under the new url, or indeed redirect them to the same page but under the new url. For example, if people click on www.callct.co.uk/site/privacy.asp, we would want them to go to www.cctonline.co.uk/site/privacy.asp automatically. Has anyone come across this issue? Is this something that can be easily rectified?

2) Only the new pages we publish appear under the new url in google, the old ones don't! We have a legacy CMS solution (about 5 years old) which we use. I'm not sure how we can get the new pages up on Google. Again, does anyone have any insight?

Any help people can give would be much appreciated. This is an issue that has been dragging on for what seems like forever!!

Craig

hi, Craig,

Anthony's advice is great. I would take his first suggestion (301 redirect) rather than the second (meta refreshes) as that will consolidate your link equity. In layman's terms: google thinks you have 2 sites - it trusts one 'a little bit' & one 'a little bit more'. Taking Anthony's second suggestion would mean it still only trusted your new site 'a bit'. Taking his first means it will lump both of those bits of trust together & your rankings should increase.

Here's a page explaining the technical side of 301 redirects on a whole bunch of different platforms:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

I hope that's useful,

daniel

Hi Crag

Yes, pretty much.

I've pasted some directions specifically for IIS below, borrowed from http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php.
IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
• Enter the redirection page
• Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
• Click on 'Apply'

Anthony

On 08:36:42 3 August 2007 Craigus2002 wrote:

 

Hi Anthony

Thanks for this, great advice. All our pages are .asp. Example url -  http://www.callct.co.uk/site/template.asp?Id=694&class=product.  Would I still go about putting a 301 redirect in the same way?

Craig

On 17:39:52 2 August 2007 Anthonys wrote:

 

Hi Craig

You didn't say how you tried to redirect the traffic to the new site.

The best approach is to use permanent "301" redirects, as these are search engine friendly, and will transfer both traffic and PageRank to your new pages.

They should, ideally, be set up on an individual basis from each old page to the new one, not just dumping all the old pages' traffic onto your homepage.

Also, Google appears to like a delay to be added, along with some text on the original page equivalent to "you will be redirected in 5 seconds - if that doesn't work please click here..."

See how they redirect this page: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

to this one:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal for example.

This will also prevent Google from indexing your pages' content twice, and risking duplicate content penalties as a result.

You should also ensure that your sitemaps (visible and .xml) have all been updated.

(If your new pages hadn't been up so long, I would suggest refreshing them with your old urls first, so that the search engines find your old pages with the redirects, then update them with the new urls and refresh (i.e. ping) Google again to let it know that they have changed. This way it will notice all of your redirects in the shortest time possible.)

Has this helped?

Anthony Sharot

www.marketappeal.co.uk