SEO Tycoon

**Scott00** · 04-03-2006, 06:54 PM

My site was rebuilt and went from php to htm. The new site was loaded before the new year and the new pages have yet to show up on search engines. But the old (php) pages are still there. If I go to yahoo, search my site and click on "more from this site" all of my php pages (and some very old html pages) come up. But no htm pages...
When I try to check the cache of the new site it says "error, requested url was not found on this server". This happens for all search engines.
As far as I can tell the new "htm" site has never been indexed. At the beginning everyone told me to be patient but it's been over 4 months...
I did have page ranking before, I do have backwards links and a sitemap. Basically, it is the exact same site that the php was, it was just changed to htm.

**vangogh** · 04-03-2006, 09:14 PM

4 months does seem like a long time to wait.

Did you try using a 301 redirect from the old .php pages to the new .htm pages? That will let the search engines know to look for the new extensions.

Are your backlinks pointing to the old .php pages? or the new .htm pages?

With Google you can submit the site to Google Sitemaps.

Try adding a link in your signature here and making a few posts.

**Scott00** · 04-03-2006, 09:26 PM

We did a 404 redirect. The old php's have been taken off the server because we thought that the perhaps the crawlers were getting confused between index.htm and index.php.
Most of the backlinks go to the home page. Maybe 5% go to a specific page which may be an old php, but I think that I've got most of them changed.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks!

**Sarangan** · 04-03-2006, 09:56 PM

The same problem I had too before a long time ago.. But google sitemap helped me..

**vangogh** · 04-03-2006, 10:14 PM

I think the problem is the 404 which means page not found. The search engines wouldn't be looking for a new page with the 404. I'm actually surprised they would even show the pages after 4 months since you're basically telling them the page doesn't exist.

With the backlinks to the home page do they specifically go to domain.com/index.php or domain.com? Having them go to domain.com would be better.

Try adding a couple of links to your forum signature here and make a few posts. You can add a few links, one to your home page and a couple to some interior pages. Maybe one to your sitemap. The search engines spider this site regularly so it shouldn't take too long for them to pick up the links. The more posts the quicker they should find the link.

Do you know how to add a link to your forum signature?

Also since some of the old pages are still indexed you can try changing the 404's to 301 redirects. Assuming you're on a *nix server you can see how to create the 301's in an .htaccess file in this SEOmoz article Guide to Applying 301 Redirects in Apache

**Scott00** · 04-04-2006, 10:37 AM

I'll look at changing the 404 to 301's but the pages are gone (off the server). I can reload them but we just took them off because we thought that might have been part of the problem. Seems that my designer left the new and old pages in the www folder and assumed that the the newest pages would be used. I also just realized that there was no domain.com, it went automatically to domain.com/index.htm. When we took the old index.php off the server this stopped and now goes to domain.com. This all has happened this morning.
Most of the backlinks go to domain.com, none go to index.htm and like I said before about 5% go to internal pages.
I think I added my links correctly...
Thanks for all the help!!

**Scott00** · 04-04-2006, 03:24 PM

Stupid question but here goes:
I did a permanent re-direct from index.php to index.htm and obviously the index.htm came up. However, the root (mydomain.com) was gone. If I try to redirect from index.php directly to mydomain.com the site doesn't come up at all.

Any thoughts?
Thanks

**artketubah** · 04-26-2006, 01:30 PM

I did a search on Google for your site and it looks like you have been indexed now. Congrats.

What, in the end, worked for you?

I ask because my homepage (which was indexed for years) suddenly stopped being indexed by Google a few months back.

Nothing seems to help - not robot texts, not sitemaps, not nothing.

Maybe I can learn from your success.

Thanks.

**Scott00** · 04-26-2006, 03:21 PM

It was a combination of things. All my fault. Starting with the way the re-directs were set up from the old php to the new htm site. Also had some internal problems with the way the site was stored on the server.
Probably not much for you... Sorry.

**cpvr** · 04-27-2006, 06:10 PM

After you noticed this problem, have you tried building up your backlinks?

**Scott00** · 04-27-2006, 06:31 PM

Not sure if you're asking me or Arketubah but I did ALOT of back of work on backlinks. But there's still more to do.

**jmaresca** · 04-28-2006, 05:07 PM

you need to build links to your site. submit to web directories.