Google Searches 'Find' My Old Pages

[RAPwebCSS]

When 'users' of my website search (in Google) they many times end up being pointed to pages that no longer exist.

I redesigned my website several weeks ago and renamed (or deleted) many of the original webpages. While redesigning, I copied the site (example.com) to orig-example.com so as not to interfere with day to day work. I've now redirected orig-example.com/*.html to example.com/ (at hosting server) and that works fine. Problem is, Google still knows about my original pages (example.com/old*.html) and 'presents' them to people doing searches (when redesigning I used SSI so all pages are now .shtml -instead of .html- and most file names are different).

I've placed a new sitemaps.xml file on domain.com (and deleted the old one) and gone thru the Google indexing process (also created a robot.txt file but that doesn't seem to help.)

Is there something else I can do? Or do I just wait for Google to forget about the old pages?

[edited by: tedster at 1:55 am (utc) on Feb. 19, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[ZydoSEO]

Did you 301 Permanently Redirect all of your old pages that no longer exist under the new site structure to their corresponding new pages under the new site? If you did then over time Google (and others) will update itself with the new URLs. If you did not then I suggest you do it ASAP. I would research all 404s that are being returned by your site (Google Webmaster tools will show you they ones they found when spidering the site and/or use a custom 404 page to email you or log all requests that resulted in a 404).

You will take a hit for a while until everything equalizes, but your rankings should come back eventually. You'll want to leave the 301 redirects in place indefinitely.

[minnapple]

I recently redesigned a small web site and 301'ed eight old page urls to new ones. It took 16 days after googlebot visited to totally drop the old pages for the new.

[RAPwebCSS]

Thank you - I'll start doing that ... my problem is that there are >50 old pages and most do not have a corresponding page and it's been over 20 days since the redesigned site was indexed.

Looks like my work is set for me !