search engines indexing my pages wrongly

does the title make any sense??


recently i changed the entire layout of my website, i went from a normal script to joomla, while I was working on my site, I did so by creating a subfolder on my site and worked there, that was for about a month. the folder was named joomla.

I then deleted all the contents in my root directory and placed the new site there, and then deleted the folder joomla.

the problem now is that the search engines have indexed the old root files and the file in the folder joomla, 719 pages have been indexed all giving a 404..


what should i do now??

man that is bad news. 301 redirect is I think what you should have done, instead of deleting everything. I don't know if you can still do it now.

On a side note it can take the search engines a while to update also

expect that mess to last for months, try to find a plugin for joomla that lets you do 301 redirects from the old urls that are broken to the right 1's and go add em all in and then at least you wont be sending out 404's!

the googlebots will recrawl your site. if your old urls are doing 404's properly, they will get dropped from the index in a little while and replaced with your new URLs. Darkness is correct, you would normally do a 301 to the new URL to accelerate this process.

me to ... ..

Have you at least made a custom 404 error page?
This is easily done, and would at least capture visitors.
You could have a message saying that your site has recently been redesigned, and give them a link for the home page - you could also use your site template for the error page.

Are your old pages still indexed:
site:hhhh://xxx.yourdomain.xxx
will tell you (try without the www also).
You could gather the links and make redirects in your .htaccess:
Redirect permanent /oldpage.html hhhh://xxx.domain.com/newpage.html

On your stats page in your control panel ... what old pages are getting most hits? Look in 404 errors ... start making redirects for those.

Best,

VSC