How Long Before Search Engines Are Updated with URL Changes?

[Elizabeth Fee]

I decided to tackle an old website that literally sucked when I first built it. It's a great niche for me because it's something I enjoy, I just hadn't had the time to do much with it until now.

Anyway, I revamped this site, including changing URL's. My old content is gone as well. The trouble is that search engines still have my old URL's indexed (new URL's are indexed as well). I did not include any redirects seeing as this site really wasn't doing much before, but I am finding that visitors are still landing on URL's that no longer exist.

For now, I've placed a more friendly message than the standard 404 not found, but I was wondering if anyone can tell me whether or not the search engines will eventually "catch" up? Any tips on the best way to resolve this?

Any help will be GREATLY appreciated!!

Thanks,
Elizabeth

[Internet Lawyer]

From a few minutes to 24 hours in my experience.

[Elizabeth Fee]

Hm.. it's been over a week since I changed everything up (in fact maybe two weeks) and the search engines definitely still have my old URL's indexed.

[John Redlinger]

I'm sure the correct information will show up on-line eventually. BEST OF LUCK TO YOU!!!

[vServer Center]

Google bases how long they wait before checking if a site has new content on how often the site has new content. Sites which posts new content each day are reviewed by Google’s spider several times a day. Since your site went months or longer with no new content Google isn’t expecting any changes.


Since it’s already been a week I would expect Google to pick up changes to the text of pages very soon. Changes in URLs and links being changed could take up to a month.

[guzpra]

have you ping your new site?
the site that has more backlinks from high PR website usually get indexed quickly

[paulgl]

You should not have deleted anything, or redirected anything.
Just put a big, fat link on each one to the new stuff.

By search "engines," I assume you are talking about only
1.

How often does google crawl your site? If it crawls it constantly,
it would appear quite soon. No updates in a while probably means
that google does not crawl it often. They may not have crawled
it in ages. Give them a reason. And keep giving them reasons.

Start building more backlinks.

A reiteration of words to the wise. Don't delete indexed urls/content.
Work with it.

Paul

[Elizabeth Fee]

Originally Posted by paulgl

You should not have deleted anything, or redirected anything.
Just put a big, fat link on each one to the new stuff.

By search "engines," I assume you are talking about only
1.

How often does google crawl your site? If it crawls it constantly,
it would appear quite soon. No updates in a while probably means
that google does not crawl it often. They may not have crawled
it in ages. Give them a reason. And keep giving them reasons.

Start building more backlinks.

A reiteration of words to the wise. Don't delete indexed urls/content.
Work with it.

Paul

Hey Paul,

Thanks for the feedback. I had a feeling that I was probably going to regret having removed the original stuff there, but I was unhappy with it the way it was. I'll make sure to avoid doing this in the future for other sites that I have plans to revamp.

I have been much more frequent in updates to the site, so hopefully with some time Google will start crawling my site more frequently. I'll just be patient and sock this one up to a good learning experience.

Thanks again!!

[Elizabeth Fee]

Originally Posted by steady

Submitting a sitemap to search engines would help I suppose.

Yep, I did that immediately as soon as I added all new content and had the site exactly the way I wanted it after the revamp. Thanks so much for your response.

[networm]

I usually got results from few minutes to 2-days max.

Try submitting your website on the link below, to let Google re-crawl your website;

http://www.imtalk.org/cmps_index.php?pageid=IMT-Website-Submitter