June 27th Screw Up Fixed

Check your parked domains. I have seen several sites of late with domains parked on them getting squashed due to the parked sites "appearing" as "mirrored" sites.

Dave

 

My parked domains are completely different from and unassociated with my environmental chemistry site. You could have a point about my forwarded domains, however. I will check those out.

==UPDATE==
My forwarded domains are clean.

 

I also noticed an increase of indexed pages in Google. Nice work

 

Just thinking outloud Ken. I simply can't see why they have a problem with your site.

Dave

 

It was a good thought and worth checking out. I think we get back to two issues. 1) potential duplicate content/doorway penalty due to errors that Google couldn't handle in my chemical database but didn't cause problems for real web browsers and 2) Coop links.

I've fixed the chemical database issues last week and today I added rel=nofollow to the coop links until I can remove them in two weeks.

Some other tweaks I made shouldn't have any impact on Google, but will improve the user expierence. These changes include a previously scheduled data update to my periodic table of elements (to stay one step ahead of the other sites that copy my data) and a restructuring of the site directory on my main page to make it more readable and easier to find stuff on.

 

Ken... I suspect this 302 may be part of your problem...

Dave

 

Thak's weird! Here is the redirect code I use in the .htaccess file for that domain.

RedirectMatch ^/(.*) http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com/$1 [R=301,L]

 

Try this...

You also should probably do a header check on all your other domains to make sure that they are forwarding properly.

Dave

 

Done

How do I do this?

 

I'm in the same boat Ken... this is a really hard hitting Google change.

 

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

The .co.uk is now returning a 301. *Hopefully* this was the issue and your rankings return.

Dave

 

Okay here's the scoop. The other domains are registered and forwarded by GoDaddy who uses 302 redirects; however, Google is not listing any results when I do searches for those domains.

 

This is a problem.

You need to get those 302's changed to 301's.

I saw this exact same thing happen to another terrific site.

I don't know if GoDaddy will do 301's. By default, they're all 302's.

You may have to try and find a host willing to simply 301 the domains for you and find out what they'll charge for that.

Dave

 

I find it interesting that "RedirectMatch" feeds 302 redirects even with the [R=301] instruction. I've been using "RedirectMatch" for a good 7 or 8 years now. I have now changed all of my "RedirectMatch" references to "RewriteRule". Wouldn't it be wild (and sad) if something as simple as that was causing my problems. I'll have to have DNS entries put in place for the domains GoDaddy hosts so that I can get 301 redirect put on them.

 

After losing all of my traffic on June 27th, and then gaining it all back on July 27th, I seem to have now lost it all again as of late last night.

Anyone else seeing this?

 

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectmatch
Without the 'permanent' status, it is automatically a 302 redirect. You were using [R=301] which was meaningless with RedirectMatch.
The proper use would be:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/(.*) http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com/$1

Code (markup):

See also:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect

Google is doing something with 30x redirects, it is just hard to put my finger on what exactly...