Yahoo shows very old pages

[trips]

Hi,

I've been battling away at this SEO stuff for about six months now, and mainly only looking at google. Today I had a closer look at yahoo, and realised that even though they had a lot of entries for my site (using site:tripseurope.com), most were old, and some were *very* old. Certainly all the old pages no longer exist, since I moved the site to php pages about 4 months ago.

How long would it take for yahoo to drop those dead pages? Is there anything I can do to help it along?

Thanks,
nik

Vacation apartment rental in Paris

[spenland]

Well with Google and Yahoo's pointless battle over the quantity of the links they have I wouldn't expect to see those pages disappear anytime soon.

My company as well has hundreds of old pages still being indexed by google and yahoo. Some of them even go to 404 pages!

Hopefully both of these companies will begin focusing on quality soon.

[labeler2003]

I had the same problem when we totally redesigned our site structure in 2004. It was solved when we put in 301 permanent redirects for the renamed and relocated pages. Yahoo is a little slower at picking up changes than Google and MSN (and Ask is extremely slow at doing this), but once you have 301 permanent redirects it shouldn't take more than a month or so for the old pages to go away.

Put in a 301 permanent redirect for every page that has moved, renamed or been eliminated.

Information about 301 permanent redirects is available at:

http://internetresults.blogspot.com/...-redirect.html

[trips]

ah, that's good to know it can be fixed.
Does that mean the search engines don't react as much to the 404 errors? When I first started working on the site, the original designer had created his own 404 page, and I figured it was his fault for not returning the right header information and so I removed it. However, I'm not so convinced now since very little changed.

Anyway, I'll try some 301's and see what happens.

thanks,
nik

[sem-seo-pro]

Hi there

try this

To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your
.htaccess file if you are on a unix web server:

redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

Be sure to check with your web host before adding an htaccess file to the server or over writing one already there.

[trips]

Originally Posted by sem-seo-pro

redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

Is that an .htaccess for subfolders that are no longer used? It would mess things up in your documentroot folder wouldn't it?


Anyway, I looked at yahoo again (as my first step in looking for the pages to 301), and I realised what I thought was a dead page is actually my main home page - so the link goes to the right place, but the title and description is *really* old. Yahoo has indexed all my new pages, but not updated existing pages. I guess that's a different problem, but it's still bad (especially as the old text is so lame!).

in other words, google is up to date by saying
Beautiful vacation apartments to rent in Paris. Fully furnished ...
TripsEurope.com is major apartment rental company in Europe, France and Paris. We rent studio, one bedroom, two bedroom, three and more bedroom and deluxe ..

while yahoo still has
Trendy Rentals in Paris & Services
furnished apartments for short or long-term rentals in central Paris.

Maybe all I can do about that is wait...

nik

[sem-seo-pro]

Hi Nik

No that should work for any broken links in the root folder.. Subdomains would be something else or there is also a 301 to move all incoming links to point to the full URL which I dodnt think you were looking for.

As for Title and Descripts in Yahoo that is odd...maybe they are having issues crawling your pages.

Perhaps you have a link at the very top of the page that is sending the spider in a loop or you may want to validate to W3C.org spec

Clint

[labeler2003]

No, search engines do not react quickly (or at all) to 404 pages. I've seen many 404 pages in search results. So a 404 error page is not really useful for informing search engines that a page no longer exists.

However, having a custom 404 error page is very important, if for no other reason than there will be people who have typos in URLS. Your 404 error page can inform visitors about what happened and provide a links to important areas in your web site, as well as including promotional information and calls-to-action for some of your key offerings.

[trips]

I entered it into http://validator.w3.org/ and a whole pile of errors came up! I'll start fixing them and see what happens.

thanks for all your help,
nik

[pathikbd]

Dear Forum,

I have a dummy site promoting my company's Jute Fiber & Jute made products from Bangladesh. The site is my playground for practicing all strategies of SEO & SEM (even multi-lingual strategies).

The site shows a very loyal visitor, who visits my site everyday. The visit comes from inktomisearch.com. It often comes to my site more than once a day. It's probably the inktomi search spider. Since, Yahoo! has baught Inktomi earlier, they may be utilizing the Inktomi spider for site indexing.

You may also know that, Yahoo indexes pages much faster than Google. Recently, they have declared their greatness with 8 Bln. collection of webpages. The secret may be the Intomi spider bot.

Since it comes quite frequently, people might get scared and try to block it by robots.txt specifications. Blocking it might detach you from the current drive that yahoo took, therefore your new files may never get access to yahoo SERPs.

Working for
GFTCL : Exporter of Jute Products from Bangladesh