Site Not Loading Correctly when accessed through Bing/Yahoo

[JamesD]

Our website is not loading correctly when accessed through Bing/Yahoo/Google.

It seems to be linking to the old site structure from our previous website.

Yesterday I did upload xml sitemaps to the search engines but not sure whether this will help.

What is the best way of solving this problem?

Any help greatly appreciated.

[Mike Hughes]

It seems to be linking to the old site structure from our previous website.

So are you saying you've recently changed the site structure after a redesign?

What's the site and can you give an example search term that shows the problem?

Mike

[JamesD]

Hi Mike,

Yes we have changed the site structure after a re-design.

If you log onto the 'Bing' search engine for example & type 'morgans oswestry' & then click on one of the google search results underneath the main one such as

building materials,
garden products,
fencing

(these particular categories are from the old website structure)

then you will be able to see the problem clearly.

Thanks very much for your time.

[Mike Hughes]

OK. So it looks as if the old pages are still on your site.

What you need to do is delete all the html pages from the server followed by a site refresh.

Then check that when you follow one of the links from google etc that an error 404 page is displayed. This way the search engines will know that the old pages no longer exist and start using the new ones. This won't be instant and may take anything from a few days to weeks

Mike

[peblaco]

It looks like your pages have been renamed with different .html file names. Your top menu links need correcting. Set up a .htaccess file on the server with 301 redirects to instruct search engines to change their listings from the old .html file names to the new page file names and redirect visitors. Because of the old pages left on the server you could suspend the ordering, wait a while, download any remaining orders, backup the old files on the server and delete all the old files on the server. Then re-enable ordering and do a web menu > refresh to re-publish the current site to the server.

[Mike Hughes]

Louise's advice is spot on as always.

Mike