An unusual question about Yahoo

[craven]

Hi Guys,

I have a problem that I'm not sure can be solved easily but I thought I'd ask the pros.

A few months ago I switched from using a php script which generated all dynamic pages to a Perl script which generates static pages.

When I switched I started a new database and built it completely different. I had left a link to the old site on my front page in case anyone still wanted access to it. Both are on the SAME domain.

Now the problem is that both versions of my site have over 20,000 pages. Since the Yahoo switch occured my traffic has died from Yahoo. I did the search site:mysite.com and found out that it only has my old dynamic pages indexed. 999 pages to be exact.

My question now is how do I get my new pages indexed instead of the old? I don't want to delete the old pages because they still generate alot of Google traffic. Does anyone have any ideas to try?

When you perform the search site:mysite.com at Yahoo does this show every page or is it's display limit 999? Or is this the page limit that Yahoo is currently indexing per site?

Thanks,

Craven

[Mel]

Hi Craven:
Kind of hard to tell without knowing what your URL is but Yahoo will display more than 999 pages in a site: search, which also indicates that it is indexing more than 999 pages per site.

When you say you are now generating static pages do you mean real static pages that reside on the hard drive or dynamic pages with static appearing URLs?

[craven]

Hi Mel,

After reading your post I went back and checked and saw that there are more pages than 999. When I was checking yesterday I could have sworn it was 999.

I guess I need to get more sleep! I've been working non stop on getting every site I maintain optimized just right for both of these guys.

My static pages are true static pages. I do have some pages which are using a rewrite rules to convert the dynamic pages but the spider should not be able to tell.

After doing a few more searches I have found that some of the current pages indexed are at least 3 months old. Maybe after the next visit from Yahoo slurp I'll have more luck.

I found my main page indexed so it should lead the spider to my new pages. I removed the link to the old pages in hope of getting the new indexed. I just wish there was a way to get it done faster!!!

Thanks,

Craven

[Mel]

Hi Craven.

IMO the fact that the Yahoo DB is brandnew may account for many pages not being included, but based on what we can see it looks like they are making a real effort to produce a very large database and relevant results.

With so many pages on your site the conventional strategy of using a site map might not work unless you could build a cascading map with say 100 category links on the first page each linking to another page with 100 category links, which in turn linked to addtional pages might get most of them included.