Old blog still dominating Google searches…
-
I’ve done quite a bit of searching and haven’t quite figured this issue out. I recently moved two blogs from Blogger to WordPress (why didn’t I do it sooner!?). Is there any way to “hide” my old blogs from search engines, e.g. Google? The old blogs still dominate title search queries, even though I’ve added more content to the new WordPress blogs. Eventually the problem will be solved when I delete the old blogs, but I can’t do that until I finish reloading all the photos (lots of photos – it’ll take some time).
Thanks for your help.
-
Can you mark them private over there? That’s what we would recommend if the reverse was the case.
-
Okay, I made the blog private – only I can read it. I’ve given it a couple of days, and Google results are still dominated by pages from my old blog. Clicking on the page link simply directs to a message saying “User does not have permission to read this blog.”
I hope I don’t have to wait until I actually kill the site before my new site starts showing up. Certainly I’m not the only person to have had to deal with an issue such as this.
-
vivianpaige,
Would it be declasse for the OP to add links to the old blog linking to relevant articles in the new (wp) blog?
Actually, I’m thinking of a different issue: I’m writing about learning Japanese cooking so when I re-do a recipe, I revise the first post to link to the newer one. I guess that’s not quite the same? Similar?
-
A couple of days is not nearly enough time. It can take up to 6 weeks for a new blog to show up in Google. The only other alternative I can think of is a link on your Blogger site to your new site.
1tess – I don’t follow what you’re asking :(
-
vivianpage — the new blog is showing up in Google. I’m trying to figure out a way to prevent the old blog from showing up and “swamping out” links to the new blog until I have time to reload all the images and delete the old blog.
-
The old blog may be there for 4 to 6 months depending on when Google clears their caches. Also, most likely with Yahoo your old blog will still be appearing 5 years from now. They never seem to clear their caches.
-
Ah yes, the caches. Welp, nothing I can do about that – just have to rely on building up the new blog.
Thanks for all the input.
-
You can remove content from Google’s cache. Here’s the link to the instructions
Removing my own content from Google’s index
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35301 -
vivianpaige,
sorry, no worries.I was talking with other people and we definitely got off the topic under this discussion, and our minds wandered. The 2 buck chuck did not help, though we thought we sounded intelligent.
-
Okay, so Google says:
To prevent robots from crawling your site, place the following robots.txt file in your server root: User-agent: * Disallow: /I don’t know what a server root is, so I’m guessing I don’t have access to that (it’s my old blog on Blogger).
Google goes on to say:
To entirely prevent a page from being added to the Google index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag.)' Clicking on <ul>noindex meta tag</ul> takes you to a page that says:The noindex meta … is useful if you don’t have root access to your server, as it allows you to control access to your site on a page-by-page basis.
To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>`
I don’t know what “the section” refers to – do I add the above code to a text/HTML widget or directly to the layout template? If the latter, where within the template?
Thanks so much for your patience.
regards–ted
-
Got my backticks a little screwed up in the above, but hopefully it makes sense.
regards–ted -
Since we do not have access to the underlying HTML (actually PHP script) theme files, we cannot put the meta name stuff into pages here at wordpress.COM.
In settings > privacy, you can disallow search engines for your entire blog, but not on a page-by-page basis.
-
I’m trying to disallow search engines for my Blogger blog, not my WordPress blog. I do have access to my underlying HTML theme in Blogger.
-
Then you need to ask over at blogger, this isn’t blogger, this is wordpress. We have nothing to do with blogger.
-
-
Okay – sorry. I was just looking for clarification on the feedback that timetrial provided.
-
I’m sure it can be done over there, I just don’t know how. I have a blog over there, but it is empty. I signed up for it to see what it was like and then never even tried anything with it.
-
Here at wordpress, we do not even have HTML files. WordPress and all themes here are written in PHP script (with a little javascript thrown in here and there) and all of the HTML for our blog pages etc., is created on the fly by the PHP script files and we do not have any access to those files.
- The topic ‘Old blog still dominating Google searches…’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 