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-- Rich
The surprising thing is that there are a TON of pages from my old site still listed but the cache is very old and I now have NOINDEX,FOLLOW tags on most of those pages. Is Slurp efficient enough to eventually follow the links and go to my new site and add it to the index.
Is Slurp efficient enough to eventually follow the links and go to my new site and add it to the index.
In a word - NO!
Yahoo! still has real problem with redirects which still hasn't been resolved. Two of my sites have the old domain names coming up with pages that are actually on the new domains!
Until Yahoo! fixes itself, I don't think there is a good solution for Hermosa. As long as Yahoo is listing your old URL's, it won't list your new ones. And when it does list your new ones, you get no credit for possibly years of high-ranking presence.
-- Rich
It's really unfortunate. I held the number one spot in my most important categories for a long time.
Maybe I should walk you through the steps I took. For years I had a site sitting on the free space provided by my ISP. My site was [isp.com...] I then got my own domain name and used URL forwarding to point visitors to my site (virtually) seamlessly to the web pages. With URL keeper the domain (http://www.mycompany.com) or sub domain (http://www.keyword.mycompany.com) would show up in the location bar. With me so far? I showed up fine in both Google and Yahoo.
Last year, for business and marketing reasons, I spun off some of my services to a new company and created a new website for it called www.newcompany.com I uploaded the new sie January 2, 2004.
For a while I had domain forwarding from the old site pointing to some pages on the new site. I wanted to make a smooth transition and give the pages from www.mynewcompany.com time to show up in the rnakings. Only problem is they just never did.
By that time, I realized that Florida and Hilltop had really pounded my old site. I also no longer liked the design of my old site (it was 3 years old). It did not look professional when compared to the new one. So, I decided to change the design, host the new pages at the same place where I had had the URL forwarding and gradually convert 7 years worth of material over to the new location. It was a ton of work. At first the domain showed up just fine www.mycompany.com Then, it was sandboxed in Google and treated as it if were a brand new domain. It just didn't seem to be turning up in Yahoo except for the index and the pages pointing to the new site.
After a while, the domain forwarding addresses (www.keyword.mycompany.com) were no longer showing up in Yahoo. I have disabled them only to find that www.mycompany.com is gone.
The good news is that I am at number 1 position for "keyword blue location" for www.newcompany.com. However, I am no where to be seen for "keyword blue" and none of the other pages in that domain show up in Yahoo at all even though I have submitted them. I have never seen Mozilla Slurp! in my logs. Googlebot is constantly around and just did another deep crawl. They show up well in Google for keyword blue location, keyword red location, etc.
I have now moved most of my old site to the new hosting service. wwww.mycompany.com and all of the sub directories show up pretty well in Google for all "important keywords location". The still don't rank for "important keywords". (These keywords are totally diferent from the ones for www.newcompany.com)
I have put "noindex,follow" tags on most of the pages from [isp.com...] Yet they still show up in Yahoo and some of them rank pretty well. The cache's seem very old but some of them are pages saying "we have permantently moved this page to http:/www.mycompany.com/importantkeywords
I was thinking of leaving my archives over at my ISP for some of my old articles but now I think that is a bad idea. Reactions? The only pages still there without the "noindex,follow" tags are archives of old articles (14) and my links pages (6).
In the Yahoo directory under a VERY old location that I have applied in vain MANY times, for Yahoo to change, www.mydomain.com shows up. For a while a few pages with the format www.mycompany.com/keyword.html appeared in Yahoo. Some made the top 20 for "important keywords location" and showed up, up until last week. Now "poof" except for the listing in the Yahoo directory (regional section under my old region) they are all gone. It's like starting from scratch after being listed at Yahoo and ranking well for 7 years...any advice? If I ever have to do a site move again, how should I handle it? What do I do now to salvage the situation.
I hope I haven't confused everyone.
In March my site changed our backend from a cfm one to a php one. All old pages were mapped to corresponding new ones via 301's.
Some 7 months later yahoo still lists (and slurp still visits) a handful of the cfm pages. No external backlinks to the pages, nothing problematic elsewhere, but the cfm redirects are still listed. Most ironic, perhaps, is that one of the larger reasons for the switch was that the vast majority of our prior site was unindexable - so the timeframe reflects switching over perhaps fifty indexed cfm pages.
I have also noticed that the number of pages yahoo does have are extremly minimal (~500 which is a small percentage of the site).
Our ranking on yahoo was not particularly good to start with, we had a handful of three word terms which held promise but nothing more significant. Since the change we definitivly dominate our industry within G while yahoo and MSN all but ignore us. I am not necessarily impressed with the site these two engines return (specifically not because I am not present - rather the competitors of ours that are listed generally have underdeveloped sites in comparison to stronger competitors).
In any case...bump...if anyone has the goods on Y and 301's please do share.
The original site, new doman is now appearing the top ten for "red widgits location" BUT it appears as:
[mycompany.com.hostingcompany.com...]
This is SO frustrating...how do I get it fixed?
I have the same experience as others in this thread, rebranded my old domain to a new domain name, put in 301s, site ranks the same, includes the old pages, which were not renamed, but in the serps the old domain name is still listed, with the new pages, it's getting indexed fairly well, but yahoo just can't get the domain name changed in their system. It's an odd bug, I don't get much yahoo traffic on that site, the target audience uses google almost exclusively, which still has the site in the sandbox, so traffic is pretty much dead compared to before the rebranding. It will be interesting to see which comes first, getting out of the sandbox or yahoo finally listing the new domain.
I find Y a waste of time myself, one site I have has 700+ pages listed in G but only 6 in Y!
Even though I have numerous #1 returns in Y the traffic is often virtually zero compared to G.
For me and my area Y is hardly worth considering
Regards
Rod
Anecdotal evidence from all the people I meet seems to show they only use Google.
An interesting thing for me is to look at these boards in comparison to what I see elsewhere. I do not personally know anyone else who builds sites etc or even understands them. All of these people tend to follow the same pattern. I believe it is important to look at these things as many of us fall into the trap of thinking others think as we do.
A fine example is the firefox debate. Outside this forum I don't know anyone that has even heard of it!
<<<< A fine example is the firefox debate. Outside this forum I don't know anyone that has even heard of it!
Currently Firefox/Netscape use is rising, on one commercial, non-geek, reasonably well trafficked site we are getting between 5-8% mozilla/firefox/netscape users.
There's a lot of people out there who may not know much about computers, but do know that their systems have been taken over by malware, or who read the wall street journal, or USA today, or other major news sources, all of which have published articles, especially the CERT advisory against using IE.
A recent study showed that about 80% or more of all IE Windows running computers are filled with malware. People don't like this, and have taken notice. Sysadmins are taking notice, you can save yourself a lot of work on a big network by switching users to Firefox/Netscape. But I don't want to go off topic, just to point out the gecko numbers are real, and they're growing very fast, firefox just now released version 1.0.
I don't ignore yahoo/msn, and I don't ignore gecko browsers, they are projected to go up to 10% fairly soon, that's a number far too high to ignore.
-- Rich
But I think you are part of a bigger November 5 update so make sure you look at the global changes not just what you have done.
