Googlebot hasn't crawled my redesigned site in 7 days

[budbiss]

Hello, two weeks ago we launched a completely redesigned version of our ecommerce site. Now we are using a Yahoo store instead of OSCommerce. The URLs, page titles and meta tags are much better now. Anyway, Google did a partial crawl of the new site, but hasn't come back in seven days. Does this necessarily indicate a problem?

[agerhart]

Depends.

How often did they visit your site before the re-launch?

Did you setup 301 redirects from all old pages to their new versions?

Have you evaluated if there are any barriers to crawling that may have been introduced accidentally?

[budbiss]

Hi Agerhart, thanks for the response!

How often did they visit your site before the re-launch?

I honestly haven't kept track of Googlebot's visits in the last six months of the old site (it had so many issues, I just focused on the new site's developement.) I can say that at one point it was coming everyday and that pattern persisted for many months.

Did you setup 301 redirects from all old pages to their new versions?

No, our old website ran OSCommerce and all the pages where generated from a database and it was all on our own server.

Now we use a Yahoo store and even though it's most likely still generating the pages dynamically, the excecution is much better.

Anyway, when we switched to Yahoo, we had to use their web server (as far as I understand) and I didn't see a way to 301 the old database-created pages from the old site.

Have you evaluated if there are any barriers to crawling that may have been introduced accidentally?

No and honestly I'm not really sure where to begin. Any suggestions?

[budbiss]

I wanted to give you guys an update. I just checked Google Webmaster Tools and today it is reporting that Googlebot visited on 2/24. So I guess there isn't a problem after all.

[WiseWebDude]

That's good to hear, but you made a HUGE mistake hosting on Yahoo. They are well-known to be HORRIBLE. Do some searches on them on this site and you will see what I mean. HORRIBLE service...cutting people's sites of without warning, shopping carts not working, etc., etc. That was a very bad mistake there IMHO. I feel so bad for people who get conned into hosting with Yahoo...then they find out all of this after it is too late and Yahoo! ruins them, sigh. I would move from them ASAP if I were really serious about my business and host on a dedicated server of my own. Sorry to hear you chose Yahoo! and I wish you the best.

[edited by: WiseWebDude at 5:23 pm (utc) on Feb. 28, 2008]

[budbiss]

WiseWebDude, I appreciate your honesty and advice. So far the site is actually working out great. Or, maybe it's just that it's not that hard to beat OSCommerce :) I did do research before going with Yahoo and I did read some bad things. But the truth is that I read bad things about every ecommerce suite and service out there. The best option would have been to go custom, but we don't have the money for that unfortunately. Anyway, so far so good with Yahoo. We'll see what happens. Thanks again for your comments!