Google Update

What exactly is a Google Update

[frfvr]

My site position in SE results during the first year eventually reached the first page and the highest tool bar PR was 5. During that time, I had a virtual host until the ISP changed their name, and my URL as well about 6 months ago. Then my site dropped out of sight within a week, so I got independently hosted with a new and simple dot com home page. Then I updated my ODP listing, notified the change to my links and resubmitted the home page to SEs. I also kept the old site online,wherever it is, with a short sentence to advise visitors of the change and to automatically switch the old page to the new home page. But Google and many others haven't updated to the new site nor to the changed references made by the sites that are linked to mine, which have been done for some time now, yet their old referals are still showing up. Shouldn't an "update" do just that. I would expect it to clean house and simply bring listings up to date by recognizing the specific changes automatically when they happen. It would help to eliminate a lot of redundant material from their own data base and the reults would be much more efficient and useful if the updates would take 6 minutes instead of 6 months.

[diamondgrl]

Do NOT keep the old site around. Google is no doubt giving your site a duplicate content penalty. What you need to do is figure out if you can do a 301 redirect from each page of the old site to the new one. If you don't know what that is, look it up. Your old ISP may make it difficult for you to do that, in which case you need to simply get rid of it.

[frfvr]

Thanks for the tip diamongrl. The Old site is now gone!

[frfvr]

ok, now the old site is gone and the referals it made to my new domain have stopped. Only occasional hits appear, presumably from my links. Also, the charts that appear in the site administrator of my new domain sank to the bottom and they can't get much lower. Will the next update resolve this now within a few days, or what can I expect.

[matt21811]

Sounds to me like you didn't do the 301 redirect like Diamond Girl suggested. Instead you just deleted the site. If you want to keep the residual traffic your old site had then I'd work on the redirect.
Good luck.

[diamondgrl]

Yes, definitely do a 301 redirect if you can. The problem is not only a short-run one (no redirect traffic) but a long-term one.

Google may not figure out for a long time (many many many months) that you really meant to delete the old one. It might just thing that you are down temporarily. So it will maintain your site in the index and never pick up the new one because of duplicate content.

I should have emphasized the redirect even more in my first post.

[frfvr]

In my case, a 301 redirect is better done by a qualified IT, so I have requested my ISP to redirect the old site to the new domain. The request gets reviewed by their IT in a few days. It depends on their response now whether this will be handled properly, if at all. Also, I want to let you know that I very much appreciate receiving your inputs. This Forum certainly is an excellent source for learning.

[internetheaven]

What exactly is a Google Update?

If we gave you a definition this month we would have to update it every two weeks .....

[chrisnrae]

"so I have requested my ISP to redirect"

Make sure they do a 301 redirect via htaccess and not a simple meta refresh - it needs to be a "real" 301 redirect for the search engines to understand it and follow it. Good luck.

[frfvr]

"Make sure they do a 301 redirect via htaccess" Believe it or not I actually wondered if they would do a 301 via htaccess or cause redirects to look something like spam with the use of some other process. So now, before they come in on Monday, I'll let them know this. Thanks.