Google pulling up old site better than new one?

August 30, 2005 4:13 PM

I call upon the Gods Who Get Google -- why is one site outperforming another? How can I fix this?

After six months, a wiki I had set up at database.ssonicnet.com moved to shit.sclassic.net in March. Since this move, the shit.sclassic.net address has gotten more links to it from outside pages and has grown more rapidly than the database.ssonicnet.com version. However, database.ssonicnet.com consistently outperforms shit.sclassic.net on Google search results, despite having been down for six months. In addition, Google has indexed 2,540 database.ssonicnet.com pages compared to a pitiful 372 for shit.sclassic.net. What can I do to reverse this?

posted by Hot Like Your 12V Wire to Technology (6 answers total)

Set up HTTP redirects on the old site, and Google will count links to it as links to the new one.
posted by cillit bang at 4:19 PM on August 30, 2005

First of all, you should have HTTP redirects from the old site to the new if at all possible.

Second, Google moves in mysterious ways, and I've often seen it take well over 6 months for things to stabilize after a domain name change.

Third - and this is totally unsubstantiated - maybe Google doesn't like the word "shit" in the new domain name, flagging it as spam or something inappropriate. That one's just a guess.

Good luck!
posted by mmoncur at 8:47 PM on August 30, 2005

Check the pagerank of both domains. Really though I agree with the others that the number of factors that go into google's ranking is huge. Age of the site, name of the domain, number of internal links and number of external links, WHOIS information of the registrant, etc. could all play a factor.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:14 AM on August 31, 2005

Just an extra point about using HTTP redirects when moving a site - make sure they're permanent redirects (status 301), not temporary (302).
posted by malevolent at 4:43 AM on August 31, 2005

Google has settable preferences, which many people don't realize. One of them is 'safe' filtering and it's set by default to moderate. Theoretically this only does explicit images, not text, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work. perhaps you should try a search with it off and see how that differs?
posted by phearlez at 11:07 AM on August 31, 2005

Best answer: Actually, my guess is you're never going to find out why... We have a whole new portal that was spun off a single page on our corporate website, four years ago. At the time that single page was extremely successful and popular, and thus was ranked very high by Google. That's partially why we decided to spin it off and make it its own portal.

Since then, the new portal has been very successful. It has many more incoming links than the old page (we contacted most people linking to the old page and ask them to update it), it has a higher PageRank, and we have a redirect on the old page to the new portal, and there are no inappropriate words anywhere.

However, after four years, the old page is still higher ranked on Google than the new page. I've never been able to understand why and have given up on it.
posted by tuxster at 12:33 PM on August 31, 2005