8 replies to this topic

[outofbounds]

hello everyone;

I recently updated a client site for SEO and all the pages were changed. this includes the file name, directory structure, text, navigation, etc. I have the following questions:

1. How do i get rid of the old pages in the google, yahoo indexes? They still show the old pages. Is there something i can do? The pages they indexed before have been either deleted from the folder or moved to a subfolder that is excluded in the robots.txt file.

2. What do i do about the old pages that people may still try to access? Do i create a 301 redirect?

3. If i need to do a 301 redirect, how do i do that considering the site is hosted on IIS 6.0 and runs under .asp. Is there some documentation elsewhere on this site that i could refer to? how does this work exactly? is there some .asp code that i place on each page or is there something you place in the global.asa file or is it simply something the ISP does with the server configuration?

thanks in advance,

outofbounds

[TomFrost]

Think you've kinda answered your own question there. Just make copies of the old pages with a 301 redirect, and the SEs will sort themself out.

For asp just add code like the following to the old pages:

<%
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.old-domai...o.uk/page.asp?" & Request.QueryString
%>

[Jill]

They will eventually disappear and the new ones will reappear.

I would make sure to do a 404 custom error page as opposed to a 301 redirect. Best just to make a clean break, and easier for the engines and your visitors.

[outofbounds]

to all:

thanks for the input. I have put up a custom 404 error page but was still wondering about how long to wait, or what i can do, to get those pesky old, dead pages out of the google and yahoo indexes! more of those pages are showing up than the new ones!

will google and yahoo crawlers "understand" the custom error page and delete the pages eventually or what? google visits the site regularly and continues to keep those old pages in their index.

thanks in advance.

[Jill]

Does your custom 404 page return a 404 error to the server?

Make sure it does, or they'll never disappear.

[outofbounds]

jill;

is that something i tell the ISP administrator hosting the site to set up with IIS or what? I assume that this is done within the IIS adminstration tool somehow.

thanks

[Randy]

Yes this is something to mention to your Administrator, assuming you find that a 404 Not Found header is not being returned.

I would advise you check it out first on a few of your removed pages. This Delorie Tool allows you to plug in the URL address of your pages to see how your server answers the request.

[outofbounds]

thanks for the link to the delorie tool. when i ran it, i received the following result for one of these pages:

HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:29:27 GMT
Content-Length: 4748
Content-Type: text/html


i assume that means that the server is set up correctly and it returning a 404 error. does this mean, that eventually, those old pages will no longer show up in google? because right now google shows more of the "dead" pages than the new ones.

thanks

outofbounds

[Jill]

Is it showing that for all of the old pages?