Google is picking up an old web page??

[Surrey Girl]

I checked out my site on google this morning and was pleased to see that it was second in their rankings but when I opened the site from there it took me to an old page that I had discarded about a year ago:

http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/

The cached page opened up fine:

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:gWjRAMQ51kgJ:www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/+nigel+harman&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2

I can see that the page that google picked up is missing index.html at the end of the address but I'm a bit peeved as I get lots of hits from google and it will look as though the site is all to pieces and will discourage my visitors.

Has anyone any idea what has happened or how I can get this put right or do I just have to wait for google to crawl the site again?

[Sunchaser]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Hi Surrey girl

Preventing browser caching may work -

http://vodahost.com/vodatalk/bluevoda-tips-tricks-shortcuts/15573-stop-browser-caching.html

(Your site says that because I have an older browser I cannot see the gallery - so I couldn't see if it looked okay or not. Nothing much was showing for me)

Congrats for your google ranking :)

[Surrey Girl]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Thanks for your reply but I regularly run CC cleaner to clear the caching so I Don't think that is the problem.

I've no idea how google picked up this page at all as I have never actually published it linked to the site,I published it seperately when I was trying to get a photo gallery working which never succeeded anyway.

My home page is fine when the address is picked up properly and I'm just baffled as to how google managed to find this page.

Hopefully when the site is crawled again it will be corrected but I am mystified.

http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/index.html

[Karen Mac]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

You can email them and ask them to remove URLS, and make sure you remove that page or do a redirect to another page until it is removed from their cache.

Karen

[Bethers]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

And is that old page still published - and thus they can still get to it? If so, and they are sending traffic to it- you see a good reason why you never want to get rid of pages. Just rewrite them to work in your favor :)

Meantime, you can do as Karen has said above or you can rebuild that page with information that is good for you and linking to the pages you want.

[Surrey Girl]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Thanks Bethers,I've rebuilt the page now with a good redirect but do I name it with the address that google has ?
i.e.http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/

I'm sorry but I'm getting into a real muddle here and don't want to do anything stupid and lose my google ranking altogether.

[Bethers]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

The redirect should be on the page that Google has - to the one you want them to go to now.

[Surrey Girl]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

I think I need to relate the whole sad tale to get this sorted out.
My hard drive failed not long ago and thanks to the computor forum I worked out how to open a new blank page importing from an existing HTML and adding back the flash elements - excellent result.
As I had no need to change the index page I didn't worry about redoing it and the site worked fine with google still picking up the index page ok and I was still getting lots of hits.
When I checked google a few days ago it had picked up the address :

http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/

instead of:

http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/index.html

As you can see this is an old page that I had discarded- big mistake - I realise that now.
As I hadn't rebuilt the index page I couldn't verify the site to use the removal tool and I really don't want to mess around with it unless I really have to,therefore I picked up the address google had and imported that page,rebuilt it ,renamed it and linked it to my welcome page with a navigation button.By doing this I thought that you could either get to my welcome page through the link that google has,or via my original index page which has a flash movie that automatically links to the welcome page at the end of the movie.

The problem I have now is that even though I have rebuilt the page it is still showing up as the old page and I just don't know what else to do.

[Surrey Girl]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

I think I'm going crazy - There are lots of related sites on the web that link to my site and I've just been checking them and they are all pointing to this old page.

[Bethers]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Your page http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/ and http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/index.html

SHOULD be the exact same page. What have you done to make them be different? You never should need to put index.html on to get to the home page. So, you have caused the problem by not overwriting the index page - publish that index.html page as simply index - and it should overwrite the original - then start using your domain name as it should be used:

http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/

People will not type it in with the http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/index.html after it - and all those sites on the web are linking to you PROPERLY - using http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/

[Surrey Girl]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Oh Bethers,I'm sorry to be causing you so much trouble,you are being very patient with me.

I hadn't done anything at all to the index page when this happened,I merely logged on to my site as normal and there was this old page,I hadn't even changed anything on the site for over a week.

I have now overwritten the old page again and renamed it index but as you can see from the two url's the simple index page hasn't changed but the index.html page,which I have overwritten as index now shows the amended page.

If I import the url http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/ I am still getting the old page again even though I have rebuilt it, renamed it index
and published it.

[Surrey Girl]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Bethers, you are amazing!!

I really don't know how I fixed it but the new redirect is finally working.

Thank you so much for your help.

http://www.nigelharman-thewebsite.co.uk/

[Bethers]

Re: Google is picking up an old web page??

Glad it's working :)