Well, the title sounds a bit weird.
There once was a little restaurant on the corner which was really bad and had to close soon. Let's call this one "Pukie" in the town of "New Haven".
Now, there is a new one, pretty good and coincidentally my client. Let's call it "Goodie". I made them a website and a Google+ page and a My Business entry and so on.
So basically, they have the same address.
When you google "pizza new haven" you will get all the results of Pukie, which is also marked as "permanently closed" by Google.
Customers will have to google "goodie new haven" to see the correct My Business entry and directions.
Is there anything I can do?
If you want to remove the cached version of your webpage because it contained content that you've removed and don't want indexed, you can request the cache removal from your google webmaster account. they will check to see that the content on the live page is different from the cached version and if so, they will remove the cached version. they'll automatically make the latest cached version of the page available again after few days (and at that point, they will likely have recrawled the page and the cached version will reflect the latest content).
Related
I have a problem on my hands.
I run a website with promotional products, at work,
that maily is structured into catalogues with sub-pages for each category (lighters, t-shirts, other promotional items).
Now at some point, I had to delete a big catalogue, create 3 little catalogues instead,
and move all the links from the main catalogue to these 3.
You can imagine that links have changed also.
Now Google has already indexed the old ones, and of course, he will index the new ones when he does, but still, I have "broken" links, the old ones that are not anymore because I moved them to diff categories, and the link structure has changed.
I heard that for SEO, it's bad to have broken links (links that don't work no more) that are already indexed by Google.
My question is: how do I clear the broken links from Google, the links that moved away and not working anymore. Is there a way?
From your .htaccess file you must redirect the old links to the new one.
Here you can find an useful documentation:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=ro
For the old links having a new corresponding link, implement a 301 redirect, or your will loose a lot of your existing rankings.
If the old link corresponds to content you have deleted from your site forever, then return a 410 Gone http status code.
I have a website and in my website I have, for example, a list of Audi models. I saw, using google webmaster tools, that my website appears in the google search by the word audi, but the target page was the 22nd page from my result set, not the first. I need my first page to appead, not my last (or middle), but I cannot tell google that this is a parameter, because my URLs are rewritten using mod rewrite. Any ideas?
BTW, I have read in a SEO forum, that it's a bad idea to use a cannonical tag. So is it really a bad idea in my case?
You can't force Google to do anything, however, they have made it easier to deal with pagination issues with a recent post on rel="next" and rel="prev".
But the primary problem you face is signalling to Google that your first (main) page is the starting point - this is achieved using internal link and back-link "juice" focussed on that page. You need to ensure that the first page of results is linked to properly from higher-value pages (like the home-page).
Google recently announced that you can use View All which will allow them to find and index entire articles that are normally broken up using pagination and display them all as one result.
Our company publishes our software product's documentation using a custom-built content management system using a dynamic URL namespace like this:
http://ourproduct.com/documentation/version/pageid
Where "version" is the version number to which the documentation applies, and "pageid" is a unique string which identifies that page in our back-end content management system. For example, if content (e.g. a page about configuration best practices) is unchanged from version 3.0 and 4.0 of our product, it'd be reachable by two different URLs:
http://ourproduct.com/documentation/3.0/configuration-best-practices
http://ourproduct.com/documentation/4.0/configuration-best-practices
This URL scheme allows us to scope Google search results to see only documentaiton for a particular product version, like this:
configuration site:ourproduct.com/documentation/4.0
But when the user is searching across all versions, we don't want Google to arbitrarily choose one of the URLs to show in results. Instead, we always want the latest version to show up. Hence our planned use of rel=canonical so we can proscriptively tell Google which URL we want to show up if multiple versions are being searched. (Users who do oddball things like searching 2 versions but not all of them are a corner case, so we don't care which version(s) show up in that case-- the primary use-cases we care about is searching one version or searching all versions)
But what will happen to scoped searches if we do this? If my rel=canonical URL points to version 4.0, but my search is scoped to 3.0, will Google return a result?
Even if you don't know the answer offhand, do you know a site which uses rel=canonical to redirect across folders in a URL namespace. If so, I could run a few Google searches and figure out the answer.
The rel=canonical link element helps search engines to determine the URL that they should index, so ultimately, by specifying it for a URL, you're telling them to drop the old version and only to index the new version. In practice, it might be that both versions are indexed for a while (depending on how they're discovered and crawled), but in the long run only the canonical will generally remain indexed. In other words, if you do this for your site, over time the site:-query results for the old versions will drop (which probably makes sense).
If you need to have both versions indexed, then I wouldn't use the rel=canonical link element, I'd just link from the old versions to the new versions (eg "The current version of this document can be found at X").
Wikia uses rel=canonical link elements fairly extensively, though I don't think they use it in folders, but you can still see the results for individual URLs.
I just changed the location of my blog, and have done the appropriate redirects. Does anyone have knowledge or experience for the delay in updating all the links across Google?
Reason I ask, I wish to change the A record. So this will eliminate the .htaccess file, and thus null and void the redirect.
How long must I wait prior to the undertaking?
Thank you.
As codeka said, it can take many weeks for every page to be updated. And don't forget if you go ahead and remove the redirects by changing the A record, any links still pointing to the old location will now be invalid.
If you haven't done so already, log into Google Webmaster Tools, add your new domain as a site, then go to "Change of address" to let Google know you've moved the site.
It depends on the site. Some sites (e.g. ones that get updated frequently) get reindexed pretty quickly (every day, even). Others may take a month or two. For the best chance of it having picked it up, I would give it around 3 months.
Alternatively, you can just do a search for your site every few days and check which version Google is returning.
The 301 redirect is a "permanent" redirect, so you should be ready to keep it for quite some time :-).
Google mentions other things to look at in the Help Center article at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105 -- in particular I'd recommend working to make sure that old links to your site are updated accordingly (take the time to try to contact people linking to your site, you can find the links in Webmaster Tools).
Hey folks. I have a client who's old website was called toastkid.com. I set up a new site, alekskrotoski.com, and had the old www.toastkid.com domain point to the new site. I have a 301 redirect working, so when you go to www.toastkid.com the address bar updates to alekskrotoski.com. So, the 301 is definitely working fine.
However, i also expected that google would update it's search results to say alekskrotoski.com, effectively transferring all the google juice over. But, it still says www.toastkid.com in a search for 'aleks krotoski'. I did the redirect on thursday night (3 days ago at time of writing) and thought it would have taken effect by now. How long would it normally take for google to update its index? Is there anything i can do to speed it up? Could there be anything stopping it? The site is already registered and verified with google webmaster.
Grateful for any advice - max
Easy. A few days are not going to cut it, it can take weeks until a change has arrived in the index.
To gain information about how Google sees your page, you can register with Google Webmaster Tools. Maybe if you register both sites, and add a Sitemap, you can make Google aware of the transition faster.
Otherwise, just wait. The change is going to take effect eventually.
You must wait at least 1 week to see the update of the URLs in SERP.
Much depends on the trust of your old site that determines the frequency of crawling.
However Google will continue to try periodically (monthly, annually) crawl the old URLs, don't consider this
Would you want all your hard earned Google juice to go elsewhere just because your site was misconfigured for a a few days? I don't think so. You shouldn't want this to change quickly.