Clear Domain History?

[whiterabit]

I have a couple of domains that have been indexed with content that will be no longer relevant to the new domain content.

Is there a way that I can 'clear' the domain index history? by that I mean pull the sites out of the index, build the new content and then submit for re-indexing?

Or do I just rebuild the site and launch it and let the index work its magic?

The reason I ask is that I have relaunched a new site but according to webmaster report 30 odd pages are missing because they were indexed under the old site (/compare vs new /review). do I just apply to remove these pages and how will it impact my SEO ranking?

 

[James]

If you do not want old pages been indexed then you have a few options:

1. 301 the old urls to the home page of the website (good for SEO)
2. Block the page in robots.txt file (if you pick the 301 option, you would not implement a robots.txt block.
3. Make sure you have no other legacy files on the server, which can be dormant pages which may be picked up by links online.

 

[whiterabit]

Thanks for that James, 301s it is.

Cheers

MIKE

 

[findtim]

james is right and google appreciates it as well, what happens is google recognises that the site is ALIVE with someone behind it and you should not loose any rankings but gain if the 301 redirect redirects to a better page.

try not to do this to often though.

tim

 

[marketingweb]

The other thing is to create and submit a sitemap, this will give google a strong "hint" as to which pages on your site it should index.

For smaller sites you can auto-create one here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

For bigger sites - again the same place, buy their one that runs on the server as a cron job, and it will auto recreate and submit how ever often you want it to run.

Of course if you are running wordpress there are plugins that do all this for you, and i'm sure other standard systems would have something similar.

Matt

 

[James]

The other thing is to create and submit a sitemap, this will give google a strong "hint" as to which pages on your site it should index.

For smaller sites you can auto-create one here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

For bigger sites - again the same place, buy their one that runs on the server as a cron job, and it will auto recreate and submit how ever often you want it to run.

Of course if you are running wordpress there are plugins that do all this for you, and i'm sure other standard systems would have something similar.

Matt

Thing is but site map is just an indication of what to index, if you have dormant pages which are not in the sitemap file and they have a large number of links to them it can easily be indexed.