Launch a new website, wipe old pages from Google Search

Submitted by natobasso on Mon, 2008-06-30 22:12.

Member's Forum

How long does it take for Google to start seeing new pages? I'm referring to the site I just launched, http://creativebits.org/healthline_systems_inc_new_website, and the search function depends on Google (or other search engines as per user choice) but it's still reading the old pages so it's useless.

I've got a sitemap and registered it with Google as well as their autogenerated html page (allnumbers.html) and even have a robots.txt file stating which pages to index and which not (Help Desk pages are out of view). Google has picked up my sitemap and confirmed the numbered html file, but still no change in the stored pages. They are still the old ones.

Any tips or ideas to speed this process along? My job depends, in part, on this site doing better ranking-wise than the old one. I've got the design, now to get the SEO happening.

Right now it's not happening!

Holy!

Submitted by Leaky Penny on Tue, 2008-07-01 00:26.

I'm sorry I can't help you out here dude but when you have a sec, put all of that into layman's terms or drop some links, this looks like must read material!

And to all my Canadian peers, Happy Canada Day, eh!

Leaky Penny
Aka Artfiend Part Deux
www.leakypenny.com

Merci!

Submitted by 3dogmama on Tue, 2008-07-01 00:42.

Happy Canada Day to you too!
I'm now off to open yet another beverage.
Cheers!

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
— Frank Zappa

Sorry Nat - I don't know any

Submitted by KellyR on Tue, 2008-07-01 20:35.

Sorry Nat - I don't know any tricks myself. I tell people we're at the mercy of Google's and other search engine's procedures until they update their own database.

I had an issue a couple weeks ago where I launched a site redesign, and for a good week when viewing the web page, some pages would revert back to the "old look". In this case, we were at the mercy of various ISP's clearing out their cache. The problem did work itself out after about a week.

I went to their "webmaster central" link, and it appears there's a place you can go to find out when your site's going to be indexed.

That might be a good place to start.

i remember having a problem

Submitted by gwells on Tue, 2008-07-01 20:59.

i remember having a problem like that, but even worse, with a govt client. seems that the dept of education cached a site we hosted for them. and it could take a week for enough hits on the page for it to load a live page, since it hadn't been publicized yet. but it took a while to not only determine that, but to get the IT people at ED to admit that's what was going on (they swore it wasn't caching). in the meantime, our client kept yelling at us for not updating the site as quickly as we told them we did. even anyone outside of ED could see it, and only ED staff behind the ED firewall couldn't, both our client and their IT people insisted the problem was at our end.

*sigh*

i understand caching conceptually, but not every site is static. it absolutely ruins any dynamic site.

That's why I love being able

Submitted by KellyR on Tue, 2008-07-01 21:40.

That's why I love being able to tell people "Look - until such and so does something IT IS OUT OF MY CONTROL." (in other words, go bark up THEIR tree if you're so upset about it.)

;)

of course, that only works

Submitted by gwells on Tue, 2008-07-01 21:51.

of course, that only works if they believe you... *sigh*

After some research I found

Submitted by natobasso on Wed, 2008-07-02 04:57.

After some research I found this great page regarding "redirects." You basically have to create 301 redirects from old pages to the new ones; though google still registers the old pages till a new bot sweep can be undertaken. Says it can take from 2 weeks to a month for this to happen fully.

http://www.stevenhargrove.com/redirect-web-pages/

At least with the redirect (try to use asp or php redirect, not javascript, to avoid being seen as a "page forwarder" -- bad in the eyes of Google!) you can have the old link go to the new page thereby not causing the user to think your site has packed up and gone back to nowhere's-ville. :)

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Powerpoint is not a design application