Google picks up links to site that hasn't existed for 4 months

how to stop Google fr. providing links to dead sites?

[richards1052]

I moved my blog fr. one platform to another 4 mos. ago. The original site was domain forwarded to my own domain (myname.com) though it was hosted by the blog platform's server. Now, I have my blog with another platform & it's hosted on a shared server (also domain forwarded to the same URL--myname.com).

But Google search is still bringing up my old blog's links (which won't resolve or redirect to my current blog's link format). The original blog has been deleted so I'm not sure where Google is picking up the old links from. Is there any other way I can stop Google fr. picking up the wrong links?

People have told me not to worry that eventually Google will stop picking up the old links, but so far that isn't happening. I am getting searches which DO pick up my new links so I know google's crawling my new site. But I wish I could stop searches fr. picking up the old links.

[elgumbo]

Is your site now hosted on a Unix / Apache Server? If it is, you should read up on the .htaccess file. In this file you can set up a 301 redirect for your old blog structure to make sure that any visitors are shown the corrcet article.

If a search engine already has a number of backlinks to your site you should not lose them just because you have decided to change your structure.

There is a Apache forum on this site that should help in setting up the file - [webmasterworld.com...]

Good luck

[richards1052]

"If a search engine already has a number of backlinks to your site you should not lose them just because you have decided to change your structure."

Do you mean to say that those old links will live forever? Even though the search engine will never see them again in a live website? If so, yikes.

As for yr suggestions...all good of course. But believe me I've tried mod_rewrite in many different configurations (I posted a few threads over at the Apache section about this too) & I still can't get redirection to work due to the idyiosyncrasies of my old blog's permalink structure & other factors.

I was just hoping that Google would stop picking up those old links since they're nowhere on the web any longer.

[elgumbo]

I'm not sure they will live forever but I certainly wouldn't want to throw them away in a hurry.

I'm sure if you leave it long enough, google will pick up the new structure and drop the old. But let's ignore google for a second(!) - what happens when a user follows an old link? Do they get a page cannot be found? Will they be happy to search your new site for the article that they where looking for or just hit the back button? Are you prepared to wait for Google to catch up?

Are there a few main articles that google is still linking to? Maybe you could just setup the redirect on those using the absolute http: address rather than trying to cover every article in the old site?

[Skunkmaster]

Hi
I had a similar problem in the past,
the link showed up about 1 year after the site has been moved,

I used this link [services.google.com] to remove it.

cheers
Oran

[richards1052]

"Are there a few main articles that google is still linking to? Maybe you could just setup the redirect on those using the absolute http: address rather than trying to cover every article in the old site?"

Yes, I'd say there are about 10 main URLs that keep popping up in my Popular Pages stats. Your's is an intriguing idea. Could you give me some idea how set up redirection for those URLs? Do I use mod_rewrite/.htaccess or some other tool?

I'm using cPanelx through my webhost.