Hello All,

I have been trying everything I could possibly think of to understand why the “Google Machine” is not indexing the new URL for one of our properties, but I am completely stumped, so this is my call out to the community for help or guidance.

Several months ago we had sales pages for our email marketing service (…and to those wondering, it’s all 100% opt-in permission based marketing…we hate spam too!) located at emailmarketing.eliteweb.cc. We had a PR of 4 and were indexed well by Google. Then, because the URL was too long, we went ahead and bought EliteEmail.com in the domain aftermarket.

We setup a permanent 301 redirect (as instructed by the Google documentation and countless posts in these forums) that would point to the new domain www.eliteemail.com.

We have submitted a Sitemap, have a Yahoo Directory listing, have many other quality inbound links, have a properly formatted robots.txt file, don’t link to any ‘bad neighborhoods’, have unique content, etc, etc.

Even with all of this, Google dropped the old URL, but has not indexed any pages from our new domain.

As I understood it, when the Google Bot sees the 301 redirect, it should understand that we simply moved the site and it should index (and _ideally_ transfer the PR) to the new domain, but I guess that might have been wishful thinking.

Now my concern is that maybe this domain was banned by Google when the previous owner used it. I’d imagine Google has some way to determine that the domain has changed ownership, but maybe I am giving them too much credit.

Should I submit a reinclusion request just to be on the safe side, or does that have repercussions I may not want to face?

If anyone has any thoughts, comments, or ideas, I would love to hear them!

Thank you in advance for your help! :)

I see your site being picked up by MSN and yahoo indexes but not google as of right now.

your 301's seem valid.

Heres a snapshot of what the site looked like in 2003
http://web.archive.org/web/20021126150607/http://www.eliteemail.com/
I also noticed that the old domain owner was blocking robots in the robots.txt file.

Hello vipjun,

Many thanks for the prompt reply.

The fact that we’re being indexed by MSN and Yahoo only compounds my puzzlement. I know that Google is generally slower than the other engines, but it’s been several months since we’ve made the transition to the new URL and, as you said, the 301 seems to be valid.

I have double checked our robots.txt file countless times and it does allow access by all bots. I would imagine the bots would pickup the new robots.txt file and not simply rely on a cached copy from the old owner.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Again, thanks in advance!

This is most likely a google problem, I think your best bet is to email google and ask them what is going on.


Good luck

I have emailed Google, but have not received a reply. I’m sure they get countless emails asking about site indexing and I remain somewhere in the middle of the pile.

Could this be a new bug for Google…that it doesn’t pickup 301 redirects properly since the last major update?

Has anyone else had this problem recently or has anyone else successfully redirected a new domain and seen the new URL indexed properly? (Did the PR transfer?)

If there are any Google Guru’s out there who have any ideas or theories please let me know since I am totally stumped. It seems we’ve followed all the correct steps, yet still can’t get indexed.

I just wanted to update this thread to inform everyone that Google did write back to me, but their response contained little (if anything) constructive.

All they said was “please be assured that your site is not currently banned or penalized by Google”.

So, we’re not violating any policies and haven’t been banned, which at least tells me submitting a re-inclusion request would be a waste of time.

But, the big question remains… we have quality inbound links, unique content, properly configured meta tags, submitted a sitemap, have good linking structure, and seem to be doing all the other ‘white hat’ practices. Yet, the Google machine still doesn’t want to index us?

Can anyone see something that may be tripping up the Google beast that we continue to miss? I’m open to even the wildest of suggestions!

URL: http://www.eliteemail.com

Just as a side note, all the other engines are picking us up without any problem.

Thanks!

Your robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow:


Don't do that. You're telling all bots not to index your site.

Hello Seoapprentice,

Thanks for the reply.

I'm pretty confident that the way my robots.txt file is setup would *allow* all the bots to index the site.

You can check out the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt) entry on this.

Any other ideas?

My bad. I guess I just get a little spooked anytime I see Disallow in a robots.txt file. You might want to try the Google Sitemaps (https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&nui=1&continue=https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview%3Fhl%3Den&hl=en). This will tell you about crawling problems you may have and also has a robots.txt validator.

You're site has TBPR, but you don't have anything indexed... That is strange. The domain may have had a dirty past life. Looking at archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.eliteemail.com) it seems that in Feb 03 the site looks to have gone south. Requiring a flakey Active X download, and advertising gambling sites... In October 03 the site was wiped out (archive indexed the apache install sucessful screen) and later that month a redirect of some sort pushed it to advanceddirectory.com which disallowed archive.org to index it.

Hmmm... Doesn't sound very good. If I were a bettin man I'd say the original owner got in over his head with black hat techniques and then dumped the domain once it gained a bad rep with the SE's. This domain's sins have been carried forward and you are being punished for them...so it would seem.

Maybe write G another letter telling them about that and that you promise to be good. Who knows, maybe they'll listen. :D

Another thing I noticed is that you have many urls pointing to the same page. i.e.
www.eliteemail.com/?ref=xevf
www.eliteemail.com/?ref=czasx
www.eliteemail.com/?ref=none
etc...
There are a bunch of these. These are considered duplicates, and could cause penalties, or at best lower ranking.

Lastly, your inbound links are almost all from your own sites. May have been viewed as a link farm or artificial link boosting. I'd work on getting some high quality one way links from pages not within your network.