Still indexing a site that doesn't exist!

How long does yahoo list a site that doesn't exist?

[coburn]

We made the domain switch from .com to .co.uk 3 months back. Last Saturday I noticed that Y was still indexing our .com site. So I had our host company change the Host Headers to Redirect to the .co.uk URL for all .com requests. So in theory the bots and spiders can no longer access the .com at all.

Yet lo and behold Y!'s backlinks today show a cached version of the .com showing today's date!?! So somehow the message hasn't gotten through to Y!

Does anyone know how long it'll take for Y! to catch on? Ditto for Google. Right now the domain isn't showing in the SERP's for competitive phrases for which it has been optimised and gathered links.

Thanks

[abates]

Yahoo doesn't handle 301 redirects well, and still uses the old URL.

[coburn]

Hi Abates - and thanks for your response.

I guess the redirect we've implemented is the same as a 301 - we're on a Windows server.

So is it a matter of waiting it out until Y! eventually decides to correct it's domain reference?

Do you know the story with Google? Do we have a waiting game there too?

Thanks again
Calum

[nancyb]

With Google, it should only be a short while, perhaps only a day or so, but Yahoo can take a very long time. I had a site that was still listed for at least a year after it was dead. And I currently have many pages that were renamed with a 301 over two years ago still showing in Y's index.

As abates said, Y! doesn't do 301's very well.

[DaveAtIFG]

You would be wise to check your headers [webmasterworld.com] and insure that a 301 is being returned.

[internetheaven]

Yahoo isn't good with ANY type of re-direct - 301's, 404's etc. It simply lists the information that is at the end of the tunnel under the removed URL. We've duplicate listings of our content for months now and I'm sure its contributing to our poor rankings on Yahoo.

In my mind it doesn't sound like such a big task to make the crawler/database deal with 301's. Am I missing something?