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When we moved the site all the pages were in googles cache and results were present for the appropriate searches. Since the move the cached pages have all disappeared and the only way to reach the url via google is to enter the url in the google search input.
We redeveloped the site also, but since we have not even seen any googlebots I can't see how anything at the site could have caused the problem. All site content is not copied from anywhere (except the original site).
I checked the other posts here and they all suggest the dns refresh at google takes a while but the 2+ months I am seeing is way past all other observations.
Does anyone know what's gone wrong and how I might go about rectifying this erroneous situation?
I would recommend a 301 redirection as well as for the initial stage use Meta redirection and change all links for the page to the new website.
Also, use
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
along with the redirection.
Then when the pages start apearing from the new website, disallow old website pages in the robots.txt and use Google Auto Page Removal System to delete the old pages from Google's database.
This way your old site would disappear from Google forever with new website appearing.
Either way - we did not have access to old pages on the old server, so I just left old site intact and changed dns entries.
Is there a way to force google to refresh its dns for this site?
Unless G indexed your old IP, I do not think this is the problem. I would look for factors on the new site or changeover like;
a) Was there a gap between moving server (like did you have the site ready to roll once the nameservers kicked in)?
b) Are you on a bad neighborhood server?
c) Have you checked your robots.txt and .htaccess files?
d) Have you resubmitted your root domain to Google
Q:b) Are you on a bad neighborhood server?
A: no host has plently of other sites I run and do not have any problems
Q:c) Have you checked your robots.txt and .htaccess files?
A: have used copy of robots.txt from another site wich works well but the .htaccess is new as the site has dynamic pages with mod_rewrites etc... .htaccess works ok for users and a couple of other crawlers like webwombat etc...
Q:d) Have you resubmitted your root domain to Google
A: yes - I have also added some more links which I would expect google to follow.
arrrrrrrgh!
any more ideas?
Sorry to be blank, but are you doing anything that may have tripped a Spam algo? Cross linking between same same Hormel I am site owners seems to be causing a few headaches right now.
but thanks for trying.
That's their job, or a good part of it.
Maybe they picked up something they did not like on the old hoster. Maybe it is a coincidence that you just happened to move the site after.
I would think that google would find sites to index based on domain name, not IP. For sites linking to them, they are linking to the domain, not the IP address. DNS has plenty of its own DNS servers, so fresh DNS content is avalible. If your DNS entry was domain.com points to 1.1.1.1. and domain.com points to 2.2.2.2 google would not, should not, and cannot (if the method for google crawling pages is based somewhat on links pointing to the site) tell the differnce betwen 2.2.2.2 and domain.com.
I imagine that the googlebot sends out normal DNS queries for sites it crawls.
Your situation seems like penalty to me, nothing to do with DNS entries (unless of course your DNS entries were never updated, which i kind of doubt!)
If you changed your DNS zones pointing from old IP at old servers to new IP at new servers google would not be able to tell the change.
I would agree with the rest of the pack that something else happened around the move time. It sounds as if some sort of penalty was incurred, not any issue with google not being able to resolve the IP of your new server. Google obviously hosts its own DNS servers, so DNS information would be updated along with the rest of your hosts DNS entries for google to use.
Look real careful for any type of penalty prone content or linking methods, and tell us what you find!
On the whole, search engines are not handling domains changing hosts as well as they should, considering that it's all too often a necessity because of all the resold hosting out there that's not always the best there is - and people really don't know when they sign on.
I have seen other penalised sites - google still visits these regularly and still stores cached pages - it just does not show them in results... I see NO reason why this should be a penalty - short of very very very very bad luck/timing on my part - but i doubt it.
I am as we speak migrating many sites from one host to another and google has followed them all so far (touches large peice of wood). I am using the copy site - and leave old one intact with no redirects method.
