old pages still coming up..

[thekitchendesigner]

i removed a page from my website months ago and its still coming up on google and yahoo searches. i've also had the website re-designed and on some (not all) occasions its bringing up an old page and sticking in the new logo etc, like this:

http://www.thekitchendesigner.com/service-private.html

this is also the page i had removed.

How can i make sure these pages dont keep re-appearing, as these pages are no longer valid, and they look bad???

[Enigma121]

Who's handling your site design / hosting?

This sound like a cross over issue between these folks. Either parts of your new site design are broken, or the new site references elements which still exist from your previous pages and these change between the offline design and the online web server.

I'd suggest completely removing all files from your hosting space, then reinstalling the site as supplied from your existing designer.

If, after this, you are continuing to have difficulties we can offer to help straighten things out, for a small charge.

[thekitchendesigner]

i see.

my web designer is a good friend who runs his own business so i'll have a chat on Monday and try to get it sorted!

if i dont have any luck i'll come back to you! when the old pages have gone completely, how long would you say before google etc recognise this?

thanks

[Enigma121]

Search engine spiders will crawl sites with varying frequency, but if your site is relatively popular, you can expect to be crawled within 24 hours noting the changes.

This doesn't mean that all their indexes will immediately change however (so your older pages will still appear in listings). This can take months to happen with Google for example.

The clean way to get around this is to apply proper redirects to send anyone that requests one of your older pages, through to the new version.

This takes a bit of expertise on behalf of your hosting provider, but will have positive benefits in terms of your site's search rankings. Again we can help if you're stuck.

[TWD-Tony]

If your hosting provider or the designer has cocked-up and the old pages are still there then ask them to setup a .htaccess file to re-direct all visitors to non existant pages to your homepage (once the old pages have been deleted). It's simple for them to do if they know what they are doing :wink:

[dan_moore]

If you want to remove a page from search engine indexes, then there are two simple ways.

If the page is old and has no replacement, get your web designer to set the page header to code 410 (Gone). Next time the index is done, the page will be dropped.

If the page is still existent, but has changed URL, for instance from oldpage.php?id=3242 to new/page/3242 then you can retain page rank for the page and remove the old page from the index by setting a 301 page header, which is a 'page permanently moved' code, and point to the new page.

Cheers

Dan

[thekitchendesigner]

Cheers dan