Google Indexes Old Page

[flashisland]

Hello everyone,

 

Ever since I've moved my site to Total Choice Hosting, I've had a problem getting Google to reindex my pages as the new site. I used to be hosted on a free server.

 

When you go into Google and type the search term "online pinball", my old website comes up as one of the top search terms (www.thepinballzone.coolfreepages.com/onlinepinball.htm). I am trying to get Google to realize that that page has moved, but I'm not quite sure how to do it.

 

Right now I just have text that says the page has moved. I was using an automatic meta redirect but I heard that was bad in Google's eyes. Unfortunatly since it's a free host I can't use an .htaccess file to create a permanent redirect.

 

Any ideas? Thanks for any help!

[TCH-Thomas]

I don´t know what you can do more than what you have done, but from what I have understood from earlier discussions about this, all you can do is to wait it out until google comes visiting you again and reindex you.

[flashisland]

Yes, but I've been waiting for months! The problem is that my placement on Google is dropping since I have no content on my page. When I used a meta redirect, I jumped back up to the top.

 

From reading some stuff online, I seems that people have conflicting ideas about what Google likes/dislikes. Some people say that it's ok to use meta redirect as long as the wait time isn't zero. Is this true?

[Deverill]

I'm not sure about the meta redirect. Sorry.

 

You could at least put a nice link on the old site to the new one so when Google crawls your old site it will "find" the new one and hopefully crawl it quickly and often.

 

The main issue with search engines is that nothing happens quickly so you may just have to wait it out.

 

When I get a chance I'll try to find out something about the redirect.

[TCH-Don]

When I moved from a free host to my own domain and space

I used a 5 second meta refresh to the new domain

and put a message about the move

with a link to the new domain.

Google found it within a week.

[flashisland]

Thanks, I'll try that!

[snipe]

flashisland - you may also want to use META information that tells Google how long your information is "fresh". Many search engines use the META information (not keywords and description, META tags like "expires", etc) to figure out how often to index your pages.

 

http://www.i18nguy.com/markup/metatags.html

 

Check out the META tags that address "expires" and "cache" - you should be able to quickly stick some additional lines into your old page to help the search engines understand that the content there has expired and needs to be re-indexed.