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I recently moved our company's site to WordPress. It was necessary since the old site's structure was poor at best. It's now been three weeks and the addresses listed in Google have not changed. They're simply 301 redirects that I set to the new pages.

When I look at Google Analytics I'm finding that it is also referring to old page addresses as well. I've requested a re-index from Google once but it doesn't seem to have helped. I've also made adjustments in Google Webmasters.

I'm forcing http://openeye.net and Google lists www.openeye.net. The product pages were www.openeye.net/products.asp and are now http://openeye.net/products.

Is there a way to force Google to resolve this or do they eventually take care of it themselves? It's pretty terrible.

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    Are you redirecting all of the old URLs to your homepage? If so you need to fix that. They should all redirect to their new URL.
    – John Conde ♦
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 20:00
  • Yep, you need to set up a redirect for each old page and redirect it to the proper new location, not just homepage. This means that www.openeye.net/products.asp should be redirected to openeye.net/products and not to the home page as it is right now.
    – LazyOne
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 20:29
  • I've created over 100 individual 301 redirects for every page to their new location. e.g. /hcs.asp redirects to openeye.net/heroic-customer-service. I configured that before we went live.
    – Zach Shallbetter
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 20:52
  • Oh I think that's related to the www rewrite rule that I have setup. hmmmmm, not quite sure how to resolve that.
    – Zach Shallbetter
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 20:59
  • @Zach Show few of such rules, please (update your question).
    – LazyOne
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 21:12

3 Answers 3

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Dropping the www from your site address is bad practice because you may one day want to put your static content onto a cookie-less domain (for improved performance).

You can only do this from the same domain if your html docs come from www.example.com and your images etc. come from static.example.com - if you serve html from example.com that means [anything].example.com is tarred with the same cookies.

Your careful setup of 301 redirects will payoff - you have done the right thing (albeit except for dropping the www) and Google will have tidy listings of your site as soon as it visits everything you have setup a 301 for.

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  • Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I'm trying to restore the www rewrite now.
    – Zach Shallbetter
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 22:17
  • For anyone who found this post in 2013 like me, this is terrible advice. You can of course use a naked domain to serve your site, and you can still create subdomains (or use a completely separate domain, like a CDN) to serve cookie-less static content.
    – Karew
    Commented Nov 14, 2013 at 20:17
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Google eventually correct all of these "dead links" after some (or a lot of) time.

You should use Google Analytics, as you have already done, and Google Webmastertools, where you can do much more change reporting to Google.

Apart from this, you just have to wait. And it may take some time. But I think it is a problem that you have put a redirect script on every page that you say no longer works. Then the page is not entirely closed down and "dead" so it may take longer, before it is shut down from search engines.

You can also choose to make an error page instead of redirecting or in addition, for example by using .htaccess. This way, new users coming in via search engines to dead pages will be told the reason and refered to a working page.

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  • The problem is, is that I will loose all of my external link weight if I force 404 errors on those pages.
    – Zach Shallbetter
    Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 20:18
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have you verified both with Google webmaster tools? verify both and then select your preference.

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