So one of the reasons I’ve been light on the blogging is I’ve got a lot of projects going on. One of which involved rebranding a domain from a crappy hyphenated domain to a brandable/purchasable one. So I had my XML sitemap ready to go. I had my htaccess ready to go with redirects in place. I let the dogs loose about a week and half ago and things are not going entirely according to plan.
The htaccess is redirecting the traffic so everything that was ranking is being sent to the right spot. However a site command still shows 200+ pages in the google index under the old domain. More disturbingly webmaster central throws this error
Using some header checker tools I verified there is only one 301 being used no chaining or multiple 301, 302, or any other redirects are occurring. So it looks like webmaster central has an issue interpretting a 301 from one domain to another. I want to keep feeding them the sitemap at least until they pick up that most of the files have moved and adjust them in the index. So I’m stuck wondering am I in some bizzare data flux or is Google just having “issues”.
Hey Google instead of falsely accusing people of illicit practices, you publish a site migration guide. I’m sure that’s something people really want more than the ability to narc on the guy next to them.
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I am having the same thing reported for a single 301 from http://www.domainname.com to domainname.com.
Yep … it is as if there is a “phantom” Google out there which doesn’t connect with the rest of the world.
I don’t have any 301s going at the moment … but my AdSense inbox fills up with messages chatizing me about sites with only one ad unit … which I don’t have and comments about why I should change to direct depositi … when I have been on direct deposit for more than a year … and of course the direct deposit info is prominently displayed in my Google AdSense account data. Does the lest hand of Google even have a clue about the right hand?
Thanks for the info. I’ll be migrating my own site to a new domain hopefully soon and am naturally somewhat nervous. This isn’t exactly good news for me, but I’d still rather know what problems I may encounter than be surprised by them.
I’ve got the same problem. We recently migrated and did not change any site structure, site was exactly the same just on a different domain. I uploaded the same sitemap and received the redirect error. We’ve got a 302 on certain pages depending on current inventory. Google was fine with the sitemap on the old domain, but now they’re not. It’s one 302 and it’s used exactly how it should be…this page has temporarily moved to the new page. In my mind I should put the permanent page in the sitemap.
Still no resolution on the issue so I’d be interested if you come up with something.
I moved a domain 2 months ago and the old one is still 75% indexed. The new one ranks fine though so I suppose it doesn’t matter.
I switched domains on my blog in mid-end May and haven’t seen any problems. I just checked with the site command on the old domain and it returns nothing. So if it’s an issue then it’s relatively new.
Are you saying that the sitemap for domain #1 has URLs pointing to domain #2? If so, that’s the problem. Sitemaps can only contain URLs that are in the same directory they are or “beneath” them in the directory structure of the site that they’re served from – URLs from other domains don’t meet those criteria.
The error Google is throwing makes it sound like the sitemap for domain #1 has URLs for domain #1 but those URLs result in redirects to domain #2. In that case one redirect is too many because the redirect turns the valid URL into a URL that isn’t valid for the sitemap since the sitemap can’t contain URLs from other domains.
All you can do in a situation like this is have a sitemap on the new domain, no sitemap on the old domain, 301s in place on the old domain, and wait for googlebot to crawl all of your pages and find the redirects. I’m pretty sure there’s no way to seed the process and make it go any faster.
One additional caveat is to make sure the robots.txt file for the old domain isn’t redirected if you implement a “redirect everything” approach. You can get some pretty odd things happening if it is redirected.
I was getting the same warning a few weeks ago on some of my domains. I was able to clear it up pretty quickly and easily, but I must admit I was and still am curious about what “too many” equates to, exactly.
I’ve been having the exact same issue, except I’m just trying to spin off some poorly related content to end up with 2 more focused sites. I think in my case Jay Harper has it nailed. My automatically generated sitemap is still pointing to the original locations on the old site. I guess I just need to dig through it manually. At least now I know what’s up. Thanks.
I’ve encountered this same error message, but with 302s and not 301s. I cleaned up the 302s and that cleared everything up perfectly. Not sure what to make of this though.
Post your progress, I’d like to know what happens
Amen -
You didn’t get the memo Michael?
If you are a (non corporate) SEO and rebrand a site it is a shady redirect. Google recently killed over 10,000 organic links I built for one of my sites.
Interesting stuff Jay, especially the robots.txt thing. Never thought about that before.
I had this issue with a very large project I am working on. My take was not that Google was objecting to the idea of multiple redirects on a single URL (I didn’t have any of those…one 301 redirect for each URL). Instead, they took a look at our site map with all the old URL’s and once it hit a bunch of 301’s in a row, I think it just said “Hold on here. You need to redo your sitemap. Too many 301 redirects in there.”
When we recreated the sitemap with the new URL’s the error message disappeared.
Maybe it was a fluke. Your mileage may vary.
I see googlebot visit my site in my logs about 5 times a day, BUT good old webmaster tools hasn’t updated since July 30th.
I understand that it updates sporadically, but c’mon its almost 30 days….
thats why i stick to the old school — log files…
webmaster tools is starting to o piss me off…
This is really a matter of incorrect wording of the error message. What it means to say is that the system has detected that the URLs submitted redirect, so FYI, if you didn’t know that, here’s the heads up in case you want to submit the target URLs instead.
The Googlebot can access the redirects just fine.
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