Changing Google Indexed HTML File Names

[RAPwebCSS]

Have redesigned my website and in the process renamed some HTML file names - redefined others and used old names - deleted some HTML files. (Old site - 3 years old - is indexed in Google)

This is not an extremely heavily used website and many get to is as a result of Google (or other) searches instead of entering the URL.

When Google searches are done, the results point to URLs that either no longer exist or no longer contain the info that Google says.

Is there something I can do to have the correct URLs/files referenced?

(Sorry if this isn't the right forum .... if it isn't please direct me to the right one and I'll post this there.)

[edited by: tedster at 9:55 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2007]

[tedster]

Hello RAPwebCSS, and welcome to the forums.

You have at least a couple of choices:

1. Place a 301 permanent redirect for the old URLs that you no longer use, pointing them to the most appropriate current URL that is a substitute. This will preserve at least some of the power of any backlinks that those URLs accumulated.

2. Wait for Google to spider the website again, and merely let it see the 404 response for the old URL, as well as follow the links to your new URLs. Google should get it all pretty well sorted al;l on its own.

[RAPwebCSS]

Thank you tedster

Do you know the approx times between Google spyider 'runs'? I assume it's in terms of weeks. The 301's is probably not an option because there are many many files that don't exist any longer.

[tedster]

Spidering is different for differnt websites - some are several times a day, others are as seldom as once a week. The Google crawl team has developed complex rules for how often they spider a site, and how deep they spider at any one time.

[Matt Probert]

I should create a Google sitemap, and submit that to Google. Google tends to respond quite quickly to sitemaps.

Matt

[ecmedia]

The suggestions above are the way to go and you will need patience. We moved some blogs from blogspot to a domain and while it took a few months, everything worked out well.

[RAPwebCSS]

Thanks all

(Don't know how to mark this thread as resolve ... but it is)

Thanks again