Broken Links Please Help!
Hey all, I've found myself in a difficult position and need help desperately.
I had a website up and running www.atozalpacas.com that I've had hosted with ipower for a few years. I designed it all from scratch and the code was atrocious! I don't know how to fix it so I decided to start from scratch and design a whole new site.. I used Google Sites. I love the look of the new site!
The web address is https://sites.google.com/site/atozalpacas/
I didn't like that so I mapped it to www.atozalpacas.com (by changing the CNAME alias)
So now when someone visits www.atozalpacas.com they find me (new site)
BUT if they do atozalpacas.com they don't (doesn't allow naked domains)
And all the search results on google that point to a page from my old address (example www.atozalpacas.com/samples.shtml) it comes up as Page has been moved or removed.
If the www. is in front it will have the menu bar so they can still navigate my site .. but again if the www. is not there its just a page not found page and I'm afraid they are going to move on.
When I started all this I thought my old pages hosted on ipower (which I never removed) would still be there and that I could just set up redirects from the old pages to the new pages that are hosted with google..
I've contacted Ipower for help a number of times but they are ridiculously talented in talking around the issue and not helping at all.
I moved back home to my dad's alpaca farm and am doing all that I can to save it from bankruptcy.. this website is my main way of achieving my goal to save the farm.. without it we are all screwed so I appreciate any help I can get.
Greg K posted this at 18:39 — 14th May 2012.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
Hello.
If you pointed your domain to go to Google now instead of iPower, then you are going to have to work with Google to handle this. A lot of hosts are not going to be that helpful when you are leaving them, so if you are completely leaving iPower, I would image they will not care too much about the trouble you are having.
The problem with the difference between www.atozalpacas.com and just atozalpacas.com is that you cannot put a cname on the root of the domain. You can only do an A record that points to an IP. I would try changing the A record to 209.85.145.121 (the IP for the google server your cname points to) I'm not sure if google will handle receiving that, but worth a try.
Then also, for all the pages that used to exist, I would see if Google has something to let you set up 301 redirects from the old url to a new url. This makes is so people following the links (and also the bots for search engines) be able to find the new information. For people this will reduce the risk of them just giving up. For search bots, it lets them know where the old page went so the new location gets all the link rep from the old page. Otherwise, they track it that page is gone, and then have to map out the new url as a "new page", starting over in it's ranking information on it.
Good luck on this!
-Greg
LeslieTheAlpacaLady posted this at 21:31 — 14th May 2012.
They have: 2 posts
Joined: May 2012
Thank-you Greg! I will look into the A record and 301 directs
This has been a nightmare week so I appreciate the help.
Leslie
Want to join the discussion? Create an account or log in if you already have one. Joining is fast, free and painless! We’ll even whisk you back here when you’ve finished.