worst time to modify your homepage

dominique and esmeralda.....

[mars9820]

Well I don't post a lot. However I read a lot.

I redesigned a total homepage. It was relaunched just 2 weeks before Dominque update....yes I think we can call it D DAY now. (DOOMS Day).

Anyway, all the URL's changed due of the redesign and new products were added (old ones removed and a custom 404 to redirect to the frontpage).

Now all the pages are gone from the index. The old ones, the new ones never indexed except the URL's that were kept the same. They are updated with the new information in Google (checked cache).

Googlebot before came along a couple times a week (yes I was not so lucky to see her every couple hours).

What did I do wrong?.

I have 1 tag in my 404 file that might be interesting.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Cheers.

[ogletree]

I actually had my webserver down the day everybody started talking about the deep crawl right before dominique. For 2 months I had links from the begining of febuary. 2 weeks after dominique I changed my site to a new URL system. I quickly added 301 redirects to everyting when I noticed the old pages that don't exist any more. That seemed to help. 1 week ago I went from 50 links to old pages that don't exist to 64 links to pages with my new URL structure. Of course when I do site:domain.com -asdf it says 93 but when I do the &filter=0 and go to the last one it only shows 64 out of 93. I wonder why the last 29 don't show up.

[dazz]

You really just have to be patient when you change major things.

As long as you have a few inbound links to your site the freshbot will pick you up and then when they do the major update your site should be back again as normal.

[vincevincevince]

i suspect it wouldn't hurt to add some (possibly temporary) links from the indexed products to the unindexed ones

[twilight47]

mars9820

Firstly,

welcome to WebmasterWorld! [webmasterworld.com]

Secondly,
I was in the exact same boat, I had just redesigned our site before "Demonic". We were left out for over a month, altogether. I was worried that we were penalized. However, we came back and have most of our pages on all the data centers, only "ex, in, and cw" have our index page.
You may be lucky with the new system. It may not take so long, but you will be back. :)

[frogg]

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

...this tag would likely be better if it was just a NOINDEX (drop the NOFOLLOW) -- I would've thought you'd want to the robots to follow your re-direct to your homepage? -- then it would most certainly get indexed.

I don't think that having NOFOLLOW on your 404/re-direct page would would prevent the homepage from getting indexed though.