Hi,

 

We have just redesigned a customers site and it is now live, however google is taking its time indexing the new pages and still has all the old ones indexed which is a problem.

 

The old links don't go anywhere and just come up with a 404 error and so we really need the old pages to be de-indexed and the new ones to be indexed asap.

 

Is there a quick way of doing this and should we somehow let google know that we want this done?

 

Thanks

Hi

 

You could ask google to remove them through webmaster tools

 

As for the indexing of the new pages I think you will just have to wait

 

Pat

oh dear. you should have 301'd the old urls to redirect to the new ones and effectively tell the search engines about your new pages...

Use webmaster tools to do the above, if done before the 1st of next month shouldn't have to wait long

oh dear. you should have 301'd the old urls to redirect to the new ones and effectively tell the search engines about your new pages...

 

I am absolutely amazed at how many people don't do this. Either because they're lazy or don't know what it means to do a 301 redirect.

 

What if one of the old pages on that website has loads of incoming links.

 

Oooops! - You will loose your rankings.

 

---

 

The REASON google is not de-indexing the old pages is that it is waiting for a 301 redirect to be put in place. If it does not happen within around 21-28 days - your client's site will loose all credit for the incoming links to the dead pages and will lose home page rankings too.

 

oh dear.

21-28 days hopefully. But a friend of mines SEO guy disabled a SEO domain plugin for zencart effectively making urls which were like... something.com/catagory/product into something.com/fasndfausfiuasbfa/asdfasdfaun2374273dsfsd, Google indexed it within a couple of days, well atleast no more than a week and stripped his rank. He now gets zero hits and you guessed it zero sales. Very scary.

He has a case to sue for utter Gross Neglegence. I would push him to pursue it.

 

I would wipe the floor with whoever was responsible for that and make sure they never worked in the industry again.

Thats the direction he is taking. he ended the contract early to save some money and they deactivated the plug in. its sickening. he is now using PPC to claw back some business so he can make the winter order.

Thats the direction he is taking. he ended the contract early to save some money and they deactivated the plug in. its sickening. he is now using PPC to claw back some business so he can make the winter order.

 

 

Things like that just annoy me. It's like a plumber connecting your gas pipe up incorrectly.

 

Granted - doing something like that won't blow your building up - but it certainly will cause catastrophic damage.

Thanks for the advice, I will get doing this now however a lot of the old pages weren't really replaced and the new content is completely different in a lot of cases which is why I didn't do this in the first place.

 

I will try and pair up the old pages with the new as best I can though which will hopefully help.