Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy Generator

The Best Of

Go to the Best Of the SEO Community.

Noah
Noah
Jan 19, 2025, 11:13 AM
Forwarded from another channel:
Forwarded thread from another channel:
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 14, 2024, 8:54 AM
I need help. I encountered an canonical issue I can not explain. Maybe someone here has an idea? On Monday we moved everything from `` to `` On the surface everything looks correct. 301 redirects, canonical and og:url pointing to the new urls, sitemaps and feeds show the correct urls. But still in search you can find www-URLs for articles which were not even published before the move.
I checked a very recent example in the logfiles and I found two times Googlebot trying to access the www-URL but every time it gets a 301 redirect to the new subdomain. All other request went to the correct subdomain and there it got a statuscode 200.
Yet Google URL inspect tells us the www-url was selected as canonical and when searching both urls can be found.
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Nov 14, 2024, 9:02 AM
How are the redirects setup?
Samantha Torres
Samantha Torres
Nov 14, 2024, 9:02 AM
Do the www versions have backlinks?
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 14, 2024, 9:10 AM
@Boris Kuslitskiy not sure if understand it correctly but everything in the old directory gets redirected with a 301. No exceptions
@Samantha Torres not internally and externally I don’t know but I would be surprised if a newly article had wrong external links
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Nov 14, 2024, 9:10 AM
Is it redirecting at the server level?
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 14, 2024, 9:15 AM
Yes. The redirects are setup in the varnish. No clientside js redirects.
Mihir Gandhi
Mihir Gandhi
Nov 14, 2024, 9:43 AM
It would take sometime for Google to confirm that these pages have been permanently redirected after crawling them overtime. It is because these www pages have been in its index for a while and there would backlinks pointing to them. In few weeks, you'll start seeing the non www in search results.
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 14, 2024, 9:45 AM
@Mihir Gandhi I get this for URLs published before the move but for content/URLs which never existed on www?
Tamas Somogyi
Tamas Somogyi
Nov 15, 2024, 12:57 AM
@Valentin Pletzer do the rss feeds and the newspublisher-center have also the new version?
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 15, 2024, 1:04 AM
@Tamas Somogyi Yes. We removed the old www-feed and added the new hamburg.-feed (which only contains the new urls.)
There is one thing: Google did announce that they will remove self managed publications this year (obviously they haven’t done so just yet). So they don’t really do support the interface anymore. This is why we weren’t able to change the primary source URL on our own but we added the new urls as additionals (which are of course verified). And I did sent an email yesterday nevertheless in the hope they will change it. So maybe this helps?
Mark Williams-Cook
Mark Williams-Cook
Nov 15, 2024, 4:16 AM
My guess would be "internet big" and canonicalisation systems and post-ranking features like FS may be generated in different waves. It had only been 3-4 days?
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 15, 2024, 4:43 AM
@Mark Williams-Cook this is what I am hoping for. But as I wrote before: What completely eludes me: Why are content pieces which only ever existed on the subdomain after the move are showing up with the old www-URL. To me that doesn’t really make sense. Also I double checked multiple specific examples in the logfiles: Googlebot get’s redirected when trying to access those wrong urls and does this only once or twice. And since we have a full crawl of the www I am really sure that there are no wrong links especially for those new content pieces.
Tamas Somogyi
Tamas Somogyi
Nov 15, 2024, 4:54 AM
i find quite interesting, that the last day Bing has indexed an URL on was Monday.
if you set the date to Tuesday, there is nothing indexed. -> the issues is only in Google
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 6:47 AM
Hey this sucks and this feels similar to a migration I did for which was first a proxy redirect and replatform… then a 1-1 redirect to its current location after a few months.
Our Www urls stayed for around a year and old titles would also get confused about the “site” name. At the time we also noted that this was a Google issue and not a Bing one. Traffic transfer was also 1-1 until a week later it was not - and took about 3-6 months to recover (a bit fuzzy in memory now)
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 6:54 AM
Hey it’s the homepage - you have the exact problem I kinda had - happy to jump on a call
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 6:54 AM
redirects and that effs up Google
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 6:55 AM
We left empty for a while because politics and that was our downfall
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 6:56 AM
Well politics and my failure to scope it into the project… (that’s on me)
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 15, 2024, 6:59 AM
the “funny” thing is: we did the same here:
-> 301
<https://muenchen.t-online.de/region/muenchen/>```
which we also moved from
->
```
The main difference there: Back then we decided we don’t redirect (in order to start fresh) but rather 404 the www directory
And for this subdomain we didn’t have any issues of that kind (aka ranking both www and muenchen wasn’t an issue)
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:04 AM
Was always redirecting or was that added later on?
Stets gut informiert mit aktuellen Nachrichten und News aus München. Wetter, regionale Infos und Angebote - alles auf übersichtlich für Sie zusammengestellt.
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 15, 2024, 7:05 AM
but from hearing that you saw issues with a similar setup I am tempted to write a ticket immediatly. I am just trying to verify a few things
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:08 AM
The thing is 301’s are a strong hint and not a directive so Google can and has goofed - and I am just sharing my single example where if the root redirects it somehow breaks something.
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:10 AM
We were seeing {Title} | Agencies show up in www URLs in the index rankings and it would carry over to the urls
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:10 AM
Again, titles were updated for 3 months prior to the subdomain migration, so it’s either external anchor texts or the legacy URL path doing it to titles
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:12 AM
For fun, you can do a site: search - it is all still there…
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 15, 2024, 7:18 AM
wow. Do you believe this impacts Google traffic for this pages? Because prior of this week I was kinda on the fence duplicates being an issue if it redirects to the canonicals anyways. But we basically lost all of our Google traffic for Hamburg
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:21 AM
I do for my case because we first had 100% traffic transfer for 3-5 days then not.
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:22 AM
I think the issue is also timing - there’s no guarantee a fix will work right away
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:23 AM
Personally I would track traffic carefully and be ready to reverse course
Victor M Pan
Victor M Pan
Nov 15, 2024, 7:24 AM
Over time we also noted our new subdomain had less crawl activity (ergo budget) than
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Nov 18, 2024, 1:58 AM
First I want to thank everybody chiming in here. I really appreciate it.
a small update: On Friday we were able to change the “primary url” of the Hamburg-publication in Google News with the help of Google News support. It looks like this might have been the root cause. Because since Saturday the traffic has a small uptick.
Some background why we didn’t do that from the start: On and they disabled immediately disabled the option to create new publications and this included disabling the possibility to change the primary URL of already existing publications.
I don’t know why impacts canonical URLs and why they didn’t already switch to automatically generated publications (like they announced they will this year).
Tamas Somogyi
Tamas Somogyi
Nov 18, 2024, 2:53 AM
great! i see only 1 article for today. last week it was much more

Our Values

What we believe in

Building friendships

Kindness

Giving

Elevating others

Creating Signal

Discussing ideas respectfully

What has no home here

Diminishing others

Gatekeeping

Taking without giving back

Spamming others

Arguing

Selling links and guest posts


Sign up for our Newsletter

Join our mailing list for updates

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. We may send you occasional newsletters and promotional emails about our products and services. You can opt-out at any time.

Apply now to join our amazing community.

Powered by MODXModx Logo
the blazing fast + secure open source CMS.