yahoo not recognizing new site

old links, new cache content

[RFranzen]

In March and April of 2004 I moved various sites hosted by my ISP's to my own domain. The most popular pages were set to auto-redirect with the following META tags. (worldnet.att.net doesn't support 301 redirects):

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="4;URL=http://cantSay.us/">
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="No-Cache">
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

Other than a short blurb saying pages have moved, there is no indexable content on the redirected pages.

Google caught on within about 4 weeks and started indexing only the pages at the new site (even the ones I didn't bother to redirect). I'm still waiting for Yahoo (and MSN) to accept the new reality.

What is crazy is that when one views the cache'd pages at Yahoo, they come from my new site. The clickable link is still to the old, though.

Last Friday I took the next step and had my sites at att.net be blocked from public view. I plan on dropping att.net soon -- the only reason I still had it was my web sites. Is there any way to get Yahoo to switch to the new pages? I don't expect to maintain my high position in the search results, but it sure would be nice if the real pages would actually show up with links, instead of new content hidden in the cached "copies".

-- Rich

[RFranzen]

The lack of comments makes me think everyone already knows this. Yahoo! is caching new pages while showing the URL for the old. Call me crazy, but I think such behavior ought to be considered unusual if not downright incorrect.

-- Rich

[DaveAtIFG]

First time I've heard about it but it's not surprising and to me, it's unremarkable. It appears Yahoo is struggling to debug their new SE and you've discovered another quirk.

I'm pretty confident Yahoo appreciates the feedback. :)

[RFranzen]

Dave, thank you for your response. Are you hinting that I should report this behavior to Yahoo!, or that by posting here, I have already effectively done so?

-- Rich

[DaveAtIFG]

Actually, both! :) A Yahoo rep or two reads here and occasionally participates. Are you certain one of them saw your post? I'm not.