Comments on: Webmaster Central has Problems with 301’s to a New Domain

By: Vanessa Fox

Vanessa Fox — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:34:53 +0000

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.

By: lakerscore

lakerscore — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:37:53 +0000

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…

By: EGM

EGM — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:39:55 +0000

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.

By: Adam Sharp

Adam Sharp — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:38:51 +0000

Interesting stuff Jay, especially the robots.txt thing. Never thought about that before.

By: aaron wall

aaron wall — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:46:46 +0000

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.

By: Matt Larson

Matt Larson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 01:44:52 +0000

Amen -

By: Brad Morris

Brad Morris — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 19:59:29 +0000

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

By: David LaFerney

David LaFerney — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:29:24 +0000

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.

By: bl.asphemo.us

bl.asphemo.us — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:18:57 +0000

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.

By: Jay Harper

Jay Harper — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:19:36 +0000

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.