I'm not sure if this is the right category to post in so I apologize if it's not. I recently updated our site, new layout etc and also added and deleted pages. My partner then decided he wanted to do some SEO neither of of have experience with SEO so we did some research on google. The problem now is google, msn, yahoo are all showing the old links, title and description in the serps. I have submitted Sitemap1.xml to google using webaster tools, I have a robots.txt allowing all bots to crawl and I can see in the log file that googlebot is coming through, but it's only searching a few of the new files (mostly images) and the Sitemap. It is still looking for the old files which obviously are returning 404. So my question is Why has the title & description not changed? Why is googlebot still looking for old files that aren't in the new sitemap or even on my server anymore? It's been over a week now, I resubmitted sitemap yesterday. I can post my log file or any other info you may need to help me if you ask. Website is http://www.solidmasonry.co.nz any help or advice would be greatly received.
You just need to give it time. Could take a few days, could take a month. The more links you got pointed to those pages the quicker it will update.
wow thanks for the quick reply. So there's nothing i've missed out or done wrong then? Sorry to sound dumb, but if the googlebot has seen the sitemap, then why does it still look for the other pages and not the ones in the site map? I noticed that googlebot comes through almost everyday, what is it that it needs to know to update. MY partner is getting really frustrated as this is his company site, so I need to be able to explain in plain english why it is taking to long, as previous updates of the site have shown up within a day.