How to Talk to the Googlebot

[ornamentlady]

We currently use a package deal (hosting and all systems)for our website. We've been selling through our web site for ten years now and switched hosts in January of this year. Our positioning with Google has always been reasonably good. We get about 90% of our retail business in November and December and 50% of that would be through Google.

Last weekend our host did some upgrading to our package system and changed our DNS. I'm assuming that it was during the changeover that the Googlebot tried to crawl our site and couldn't find us. We, www.treetreasurescanada.com, are no longer indexed by Google. But, for whatever reason, Google somehow found and crawled our internal working pages, http://www.canadacart.ca/stores/tree...rescanada..etc. We have good positioning with the www.canadacart pages but the pages weren't published. I had our host do a redirect to our treetreasurescanada pages. But I am living in fear. The Christmas season is vital to us and it doesn't matter to me what URL is used to find us. My concern is that Google will try to crawl the canadacart pages, not find them, and wipe us out.

What code, if any, can be put on the canadacart redirects to ensure these pages stay indexed through the holiday season?

Thank you for your input and help.

Margaret
www.treetreasurescanada.com

[stymiee]

You can't really control what the search engines choose to put and keep in their indexes. But you can work with some fairly safe assumptions. Once a page is in their index it will stay there until you remove the page. You can also stop pages from being indexed with a robots.txt file. For Google, make a Google SiteMap to help them find and index all of your pages.

I don't recommend making any more major changes to your website until after the holiday season. Big changes can cause indexing issues and take months to be corrected.