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A rogue salesman (looking to boost his commission and/or move into Webmaster title) setup a web page touting company wares. When the corporate site was being redesigned, notice was taken of his site, and he was instructed to take it down. Thing was, he had done good work optimizing for SE placement. So, instead, he changed it to a 'We've moved' page.
By the time the new corporate site was uploaded, it had been completely restructured. So, I put up redirects for pages w/ incorrect URLs still showing up on SEs. Now, his (manual) redirect is to an URL with another (automatic) redirect. Ugh!
I've been optimizing the corporate site, and resubmitting. When I do listing checks, his page keeps coming up, sometimes higher than what I've done. (Dang it.) Between the roque page, the old site (w/ auto redirect), and the new site, we have top 10 placement on all the major SEs.
Of course, we'd like to keep the ranking. The only SE we've contacted, so far, is Yahoo (asking them to change the listing).
Here are my questions:
Will other SEs change the listing to point to the new corporate site?
Should I contact all the major SEs w/ an explaination and a request to change the listing? Or will the salesman need to get involved in this? (Since its his page, and he will be the contact listed.)
Should the roque page be taken down completely and I keep optimizing the new site?
I've used the salesman's header as reference. He had spoken w/ a Yahoo rep who passed on some tips.
On a related note... What the heck is this?
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML xmlns:vz="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vizact" xmlns:v =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:t = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:time"
xmlns:an = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:lmrt" xmlns:o =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"><HEAD>
and further down in the header...
<META name=vz-wizard-data content=
akaTigger thanks you...
>>Will other SEs change the listing to point to the new corporate site?
Some will, some won't. I'm sure they will instruct you to pull the page down and submit to get a 404 error.
>>Should I contact all the major SEs w/ an explaination and a request to change the listing? Or will the salesman need to get involved in this? (Since its his page, and he will be the contact listed.)
Are you dealing with different domains here? If so you will only have control over your domain. If the rogue salesman has infringed upon your material, you might consider writing to him about possible legal action. The directories (hopefully) should be able to change the listing. As far as the SE's go, either the 404's or the redirects should eventually weed out the unwanted pages.
Should the roque page be taken down completely and I keep optimizing the new site?
Depends...Are you getting extra traffic and sales out of this page? If so, keep it in there and optimize the other pages. If not, take it down.
>>:On a related note... What the heck is this?
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML xmlns:vz="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vizact" xmlns:v =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:t = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:time"
xmlns:an = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:lmrt" xmlns:o =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"><HEAD>
The above is from Microsoft Vizact. Just looking at their site, this product was discontinued on April 1, 2000. I beleive that this program did some scripting inside of HTML documents.
