Google Losing the 301 Redirect?
A couple of days ago I noticed that two sites I have started to exhibit some abnormal behavior. One site was redirected to another site via a 301 redirect about a year ago because the two sites had many pages that were very similar and were essentially selling the same products. The 301 redirect cleared up some ranking issues the sites had and they began to climb steadily in the SERPs. I noticed about a week ago that the site that was receiving the redirected pages began to slip in the SERPs and I figured it simply had to do with Google’s recent update that has been going on over the past 2 to 3 weeks.
But, checking backlinks and page count in the DP keyword tracker, I noticed that the two sites were showing different page counts. They have been showing the same page count since I put the redirect into place. So, I went to Google and searched, using the site: operator, for the number of pages on the first site. Low and behold there were 16 pages listed. The ones that had cached pages, were from Feb. 2004. Great. I started a thread over on the DP forums and it seems that a few other people have seen the same thing. A couple of days later, I noticed that the cached pages were gone, but the page count still read 16. Today, the page count was 7 and the same 7 pages are still listed even though they redirect to the new site. Not sure what to think here.