Reader Rescue - Why hasn't Google indexed my new site?

Today's question is from Rob, who writes:

Hi Kalena

My site is just a few weeks old. I was initially indexed and 49 of my 81 pages were indexed. I was Page 1 for 31 of these pages for my targeted KWs. Then, in the last week, I've dropped steadily and now only have 8 pages indexed!

What's going on? Any advice would be appreciated. This is costing my business MAJOR money.

I originally had AtlantaGolfRealty.com at one hosting company. Their speed performance and uptime was so crappy I had to move my site to a new host. At the same time, I decided it's a good time to SEO for the future AND AtlantaGolfRealty as a URL was a tick confining. There's a % of prospects that would surf elsewhere if they thought I specialized in Golf Course properties.

So, I thought, good timing - I'll change hosts and URLs at the same time. So:

I got the new host and URL (north-atlanta-real-estate.com) and moved over my site, renaming things where necessary, etc.

I then took down the AGR files, then moved the URL it to my new host and parked it. Now it points to the new URL and even the sub-pages work on the tail end of AGR.com. Pretty slick I thought. Nobody referencing the old AGR site will miss a beat.

But. I think I've set up a duplicate content problem since Google still had AGR fully cached, and maybe this is why I'm getting whacked by Google. Check out the URLs, how AGR behaves as it's parked and let me know what your thoughts are.

I also have ATL4U.net parked in the same way. Maybe Google thinks there are three sites that are duplicated.

Thanks for any assistance.

Regards,
Rob


Hi Rob

Google's pretty good at detecting what is duplicate content and what isn't, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Besides, I see that all your domains now lead to a different site: realtorsgeorgia.com via your parking set-up, although this site isn't cached yet. In terms of your lost rankings, what you should have done was left your old site up for a month or two and used 301 redirects to direct traffic to the pages on the new URL. This would've given Googlebot time to index the 301s and find all your new pages and then gradually remove the old versions from their index. Google actually recommends using 301s to move a site to a new domain.

The way you've done it has confused Googlebot (I see some pages on your old domain are still cached) and also probably wiped any rankings you'd built up on your old site. New sites are isolated from the Google index until they have aged accordingly, so it is unlikely your new site will perform well in the Google search results until the aging delay is over. This is to prevent spammers from buying up new or used domains with existing link popularity and rankings and then taking advantage of Google's algorithm to manipulate the SERPs.

Provided you have created and submitted a detailed site-map to Google with all your new pages listed, your site should eventually be indexed, cached and ranked again. While you wait, I suggest you work on building up your backward links and encourage any sites linking to your old domain to update their links.


Got a web site problem? A question about search engines? Email me via kjordan[at]sitepronews.com with "Reader Rescue" in your subject line and I'll do my best to answer it here.