Author: Rémi Coulom
Date: 10:06:03 11/21/04
Go up one level in this thread
On November 21, 2004 at 11:39:06, Steven Schwartz wrote: >On November 21, 2004 at 04:18:12, Rémi Coulom wrote: > >>On November 21, 2004 at 04:04:44, Rémi Coulom wrote: >> >>>On November 20, 2004 at 21:37:12, Steven Schwartz wrote: >>> >>>Hi Steve, >>> >>>I noticed that the old "www.icdchess.com" redirects to the new >>>"www.chessusa.com". I wonder if that could be the cause of a big loss in google >>>ranking system. There are lots of links that point to icdchess. Are you 100% >>>sure that those links are counted by google as links to www.chessusa.com ? If I >>>were you, I would try to replace all those links to icdchess to links to >>>chessusa. You could start by changing the links on talkchess.com, for instance, >>>that all point to icdchess. You can find those links by typing the request >>>"link:http://www.icdchess.com". Yahoo returns many more results than Google. >>> >>>Also, I have been told that Google gives a bonus to old domain names. But that >>>may be a wrong rumor, like many theories about Google's algorithms. >>> >>>Did you notice a correlation between your drop in Google rankings and your >>>change of domain name ? >>> >>>I hope this helps. >>> >>>Rémi >> >>Also, Google's advice to webmaster is: >> >>"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially >>duplicate content." >> >>This is strongly penalized, according to what I have been told. If at one point >>you had your web site duplicated on the two domains, that may have been the >>cause of a big penalty. >> >>Rémi > > > >Remi, >Thanks for the advise on the Talkchess links. We had forgotten all about them. >As soon as we get a chance, we will change them to chessusa.com. > >We surmise that we made an error a few years ago when we decided to acquire >the name ChessaUSA.com. We did it because, even though we had a huge following >for icdchess because we were around so long, we wanted new customers to have a >name more easily remembered. > >So we parked the ChessUSA name to our icdchess site, but it appears now that >Google frowns on that because of the duplicate content. So, we now have a >permanent 301 redirect which, according to people who are supposed to know these >things, makes it acceptable to the Google search. It makes it acceptable, but it does not preserve your old pagerank. That is to say, your are not banned any more from Google's index, but all the existing links to icdchess do not count to increase the rank of chessusa. According to Google's "Information for Webmasters" page: http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html <quote> To preserve your ranking, you will want to inform any sites that currently link to your pages of your change of address. As long as the links change as you move your site over to a new location, your PageRank should not be adversely affected. </quote> a search of "link:http://www.icdchess.com" on yahoo returns 437 links to your old site. All those links do not contribute anymore to the popularity of your chessusa.com web site. There are only 134 links to http://www.chessusa.com/. It might be a good idea to try to contact all the webmasters who maintain those pages that point to your old site, so they update their link. Unfortunately, many of them might not be maintained any more. Fixing talkchess would be a good thing, at least. Another idea: Make the computer-chess club message board publicly readable so that search engines index it. I am pretty sure that it would get a very high page rank, since there are so many links to http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/index.html (209, according to yahoo). Then, put a link to chessusa.com at the top of the main listing, and another link at the top of every message of the CCC. I am pretty sure it would be a big gain. That would require a little work probably. In particular, you should keep a longer history of messages (if not all). But the effort would be very well worth it, I believe. Rémi
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