How long does it take to transfer pagerank with 301s?

[arch_stanton]

I migrated my site from www.gladtalk.co.uk to www.ravetalk.co.uk with 301 redirects on 25 August.

All seems to have gone pretty smoothly so far, although the new site definitely seems to have slipped a little in SERPs on top keywords compared to the old one.

I'm hoping this is just temporary until Google has finished following the 301s and spidered the whole site. I deliberately chose the quiet season for our board to make the move, so I'm not too concerned as long as the rankings recover in a few months.

How long does it generally take to transfer PR from a PR3 site these days? And is PR such a big deal any more anyway?

[dcz]

For PR it depends, usually, one Google dance or two, depending on when relatively to the last Google dance you started redirecting.

This is the time that will be needed for the new page to get ranked, but this does not necessarily means that you'll get the same PR as before, since it's updated at the same time.

It's as well rather hard to tell if only (or is at all) the redirecting is guilty for the slight drop in SERPs, could only be due to less visitors during the same period of time, as it seems to be the case for your site.

From my experience, SERPs where barely not affected by HTTP 301 redirect, if not at all.

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[arch_stanton]

Just to update on this, some of the PR has transferred (e.g. PR3 on the index) but some which were previously PR3 are now PR1 or unranked.

But a bigger problem is that in the past week or so, there has been a steady decline in indexed pages. There were over 1,000 pages indexed on the new domain a couple of weeks ago, now it's down to 376.

I haven't made any major changes to the board in that time, so I'm baffled as to what could be causing this. The site is in its quiet season, admittedly, but it's still far busier than most of its rivals, which have shown a much more marked decline according to their Alexa rankings at least.

What could be causing this? A few of the old domain pages are still indexed, could that be part of the problem? I'm worried in case the problem is with a scraper stealing my content and getting higher ranking - but I've not seen any evidence of that so far.

[dcz]

In deed there seems to be an indexing issue : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aw ... 2Fforum%2F only gives 231 pages where your forums as many more :

Code: Select all

Total posts 92682 • Total topics 6040

I found a little issue with the no dupe it seems, topic links on index are not rewritten, could be some code missing in includes/functions_display.php in case you use the no dupe, but this is not a reason for what you're experimenting.

So to start with, please make sure that bots do have access to all your public forums.

For example : http://www.ravetalk.co.uk/forum/life-th ... ything-f7/ is not cached ( http://www.google.com/search?q=cache%3A ... hing-f7%2F )
And the topics inside do not seems cached either, so it could be because bots (not guests) do not have the proper authorisations to view this forum.

This kind of issue is part of why I'm not a great fan about the phpBB3 bot features, but ho well, the rest of phpBB3 is so great ...

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[arch_stanton]

I've just checked the bots group forum permissions and all the public forums are set to "Bot Access", which I believe is the correct setting.

Robots.txt isn't blocking any of the forums either.

I'm not using no-dupe, just zero-dupe.

[dcz]

hum, then it must not be a problem with the site, but rather coming from elsewhere (including google). It's just hard to tell.

A thing that should help though would be to start using GYM sitemas & RSS, listing all your threads would for sure help for indexing.

Try to install it and we'll see if things gets better

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[arch_stanton]

hum, then it must not be a problem with the site, but rather coming from elsewhere (including google). It's just hard to tell.

A thing that should help though would be to start using GYM sitemas & RSS, listing all your threads would for sure help for indexing.

Try to install it and we'll see if things gets better

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Yes, I'll get the GYM/RSS set up as soon as I have time to spare to do it. I'm actually still running 3.0.1 premod. I had done all the work on a local server to upgrade to 3.0.2 and add my mods etc but had problems when transferring those pages to the live board, so I aborted and reverted to 3.0.1. I'll find some time to upgrade next week hopefully.

Some pages from the old domain are still cached despite having 301 redirects. Could google be thinking it's seeing duplicate content? Only the index has a PR3 at the moment, could it just be that most pages are too low a priority for googlebot to go deeper into the site at the moment?

P.S. I only rarely see Googlebot spidering any part of the forum besides the index. I can't see any board settings or robot.txt statements that are denying it access. Strange thing is that it never used to take much notice of the sitemap for the Wordpress blog on the home pages - but now it has indexed nearly all the pages and they are not mod-rewritten either.

[dcz]

About googlebot tracking location, it's normal that you only sees it on the index without the virtual folder option, it's only becasue in such case, the original code does not know the forum id, since only the topic one is available from the url, so the viewonline code will not be able to determine if a visitor is browsing a particular forum, and will use the index location instead.

So this does not mean that the google bot is not browsing threads or forums, and actually, we can tell he does since you have topics and forum cached already.

I still don't think that it will be easy to get the final clue on this one, since everything seems working ok on your site, but one thing is sure : Google is indexing your forum.
We today have 421 indexed pages on
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aw ... 2Fforum%2F
and this is already almost doubling what we had 7 days ago.

Many things could have occurred, I even saw several time google all the sudden reusing very old version of the cache for my sites, with outdated urls in its results, like if some bad backup recovery had been involved after a server crash in DC or something like that.
It of course went back to normal pretty soon after, but it could only be google to have gone through an error.
The important sign is that it is actually indexing your forum so ...

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[arch_stanton]

hum, then it must not be a problem with the site, but rather coming from elsewhere (including google). It's just hard to tell.

A thing that should help though would be to start using GYM sitemas & RSS, listing all your threads would for sure help for indexing.

Try to install it and we'll see if things gets better

Well, they certainly did get better.

The upgrade to 3.0.4 was done in January and we now have 4,120 URLs indexed and rising. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3 ... talk.co.uk

Thanks dcz

[SeO]

Hihaaaa

[arch_stanton]

It's going down again by about 30-40 a day, currently 3870.

I haven't changed anything.

[dcz]

It's not a big change yet, do you see anything wrong in you google webmaster's account ?

[arch_stanton]

It's not a big change yet, do you see anything wrong in you google webmaster's account ?

I think the problem may be with my archive forum, which does not yet have the GYM/RSS module.

[SeO]

Could you tell us a bit more, what is this archive forum ?

[brian-hancock]

Generally it would take 3-6 months to transfer everything fully. The best situation would be to try to get existing backlinks to point to the new location while continuing to build additional links to the new location. Also remember that if you are going by the Google Toolbar, that PageRank will fluctuate over time regardless of site moves like this.