Accidental PageJacking increases with new 8 billion index

[Wail]

Already noticed some weird results in the new Google index.

A client, let's call them www.example.com has had many old URLs in the past (let's call them example1, example2, etc). As is entirely correct we got them to 301 the old domains to the new.

The Google search site:www.example.com now brings up URLs which are clearly not part of the www.example.com domain. No, now we have the old URLs (which, of course, 301 redirect to the new) in the site search too.

So Google claims that www.example1.com/test and www.example2.com/cheese and even www.example3.com/danny are part of the www.example.com domain. Clearly they're not.

Okay. We've seen this before with meta refreshes under the rather nicely marketed name of PageJacking. I wonder if this is an issue Google are aware of at all (or even care about as the user experience really isn't effected).

It's worth noting that these old URLs are very old. They've not seen Google SERPs for months if not years. Gwad knows where Google dragged them up from.

Google still says:

Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html

[Andrew]

After reading your post I noticed this for one of our clients.

.com redirecting to .co.uk with 301 (setup months ago)
I could see 3 .com URLS within the first page of google results

However after checking, and seeing that all Google data centres were providing the same results, I checked again, all .coms had gone.

Therefore I think it is more of a caching issue than googles results.

[Wail]

Cool. That's interesting.

How old would the redirecting domain be? I mean, in my example, the cache would have had to have been coming from yonks ago.

[Andrew]

At least 3 or 4 months ago - we are not talking years (so you may well be seeing something strange).

Are your results still showing, or have they dissapeared?

[Wail]

Still there.

The other week the site took a knock - lost about 2/3rds of its listings - which is why I was watching it. It started to climb again and yesterday morning had about 980 pages in the index. Now it hovers around the 770 mark and has this weird effect. The actual count seems to change every hour. It's like a semi-background update effect.