3 replies to this topic

[Dave]

Hi Guys,

I have a re-built site (www.thegadgetstore.com) but am having difficulty getting it indexed by Google.

The old site was on .co.uk (this site still exists for email offers, but has a 404 page with a Response.Redirect to the new homepage on .com) - so I'm thinking maybe I need to put a 301 redirect on the 404 page. Would this be the best thing to do?

Or should I do it with Server.Transfer to .co.uk/index.asp and do a 301 from that page - will it make any difference?

Or should I submit the new site to Google (I previously thought this was a pointless exercise) and even remove the old one?

Or can any experts see any other obvious googlebot turn-offs? I have re-written the links on my sitemap page to appear static, so I'm hoping the whole site will get indexed once I can get over the initial problem... but at the moment it seems to be looking at the homepage, but not indexing any pages.

I'm really worried about this as I can't see what I's doing wrong. Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Cheers,

Dave

[chrishirst]

Hi Dave,
The problem is the .co.uk is responding with a 302 not a 404 or 301 so it will never be transferred over or removed. ( source WebBug ) so does need correcting.

An issue with IIS and a custom 404 page is that IIS will respond with a 200 (Ok) because the page (404 page) is responding. the answer there is to add

CODE

<%
response.status = "404 Not Found"
%>

after the closing </html> to your 404.asp page. or you could code the 404 page to respond as a 301.
IIS is quite flakey in it's handling of redirects set in the MMC/Metabase so the safest bet is to use coded responses.

This thread has asp code to transfer all pages in one site to the same named page in another site (I use it for aliased hostnames)

[Dave]

Thanks Chris.

Due to the site rebuild (and moving to a much more dynamicly generated site), none of the URLs are the same (except the homepage). This is why I was hoping to do something with the 404.

So should I have a 404 page that says:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.thegadgetstore.com"
response.end
%>


Or should I put the above code on the old home page, and put this on a 404?

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Redirect="/index.asp"
Response.Status= "404 Not Found" %>

Or have I completely missed the point?

DAve

[chrishirst]

The first option will be the best to use then, The problem you will have is a total loss of any rankings, PR etc and it may well take some appreciable time for the site to get fully crawled because everything is being redirected to one page.

If you have a site map set up on the new site it would make sense to send the 404 redirect to there and just redirect the .co.uk homepage to the .com .