I've had a site up for over a year now, and I honestly forgot about it until it suddenly became quite popular six months ago. Due to its popularity, I've redesigned the entire site from scratch and launched it last Friday. I tried to make sure I did everything correctly: Created a meaningful 404 Redirected as many old URLs to new URLs as possible Submitted an XML sitemap to Google I've noticed GoogleBot hasn't really increased/decreased the overnight crawling cycle, and only our homepage is showing up as the new version (all the other old URLs are still coming up strong in Google). How long until the new pages take out the old ones? I'm guessing there's no hard-and-fast rule for this sort of thing, but any guidance would be appreciated.
You completely forgot about it and it got so popular by itself? That's nice. Anyway, I've been redesigning a website for a fitness club, it wasn't touched by anyone for 3 or 4 years. After I finished the update it took G to recrawl it partly over a month. I've noticed the complete reindexing was completed almost 2 months later. Yes, of course I submitted a sitemap right away... ohh, wait... lol, I didn't Ok, but it took almost 2 months. It was a extremely unpopular website tho with pretty much no backlinks. Might be why it took so long.
have you got an rss feed? I think (its one of thos 'not sure if i made this up myself things') that if you have an rss feed and submit it to a rss directory, your site will be updated much quicker,as googlebot frequently returns to rss directories. Please tell me if that is complete rubbish!
The site is www.idorset.co.uk - its a local directory/community site in England. We're not amazingly strong on backlinks, but I'm hoping that will change over the next few months. We haven't got an RSS feed yet, but as we start adding more content its definitely something I'd like to see. I hope its closer to 2 weeks than 2 months! Redirects from old URLs to new ones are fine, but for the user it often means the content has been moved to page 2 or page 3 and Google is taking them to page 1 - I can imagine it being a bit frustrating.
YOu'll be surprise how often this happens. I once worked on a site for two months, then just abandoned it after I got such low traffic. Next thing you know, a major website names my site "site of the week", does a whole article on it, and next thing you know the site is kicking butt! Needless to say, I had to quickly add new content! LOL. I basically made up for about a month's time in a matter of a couple of days. Craziest thing.
Same situation here. About 3 months ago I started cleaning up a 5 year old site, changed file extensions (nt to linux) and used 301's to redirect. Half way through the process I fixed issues with "canonical urls". Google and Yahoo now have 90% of the site indexed. I think the reason it took so long was canonical urls. Fixing that should help speed the process.
Hehe yea, kinda handy! Well it looks like some of our new content is showing up in Google already, but alongside some of the old links too.