Hi - I recently rewrote my site and updated the sitemap. However, Google is still looking for my old pages and has not looked at any of the new ones (lots of links not found). Why is it disregarding the new sitemap? Will this just sort itself out or am I missing something? Thanks, Michael steinbeck-reeves.co.uk
It will sort itself out, but some other search engines may take a zillion years. Yet not make use of this these traffic, create a few pages with new content or for redirection to the pages you want?
Ah... had not thought of that. Redirection pages in the old positions, pointing to the new pages? Bit of a mess but why not? Thanks, Michael
Yes, if running Linux, create a htaccess file with 301 redirects. The 301 tells Google what the new page is and that it is a permanent change. If not running linux, you can do this in the config properties within IIS on Windows. You can also do this in the meta tags with PHP. Google 301 redirect for more info. You can also do this inside the webmasters portion of Google but the 301 redirect will tell everyone, not juyst Google. The next time they hit your page and get that error, they will hit the new page from then on out. One more thing, if you have tons of pages you can do wildcards..
itliberty - thanks, looking into it. - I must admit that there is an awful lot more to keeping page rankings and Google listings than I had appreciated!
Use redirects and also give it some time. Google is slow with site updates. Thankfully I have not recieved any penalization due to it.
For me what I do is even when updating sites, I keep the old structure and page names, so that in this way the SEO efforts won't go to waste. At most I add new pages, but thats about it.
Usually these things take time for the crawler to finishing crawling your site and update to their index. That's why you just need to keep on submitting fresh contents so that they will recognize your site as having importance and they will keep on coming back for it.
Yesit will found out the previous existed pages although they are not there. After several times of 404 pages, google will not crawl that page . But if you delete the page that have inbound links point to, google will crawl that no-existed page again and again and got a 404 page.