yahoo and bing search results caching old version of my website [closed]

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I just put up a new site for my friends company.
If you search on google the link takes you to the correct home page www.durangoshadecompany.com.

However, if you search using yahoo or bing the link that comes up goes to a cached version of the page www.durangoshadecompany.com/index.html. This worked for the old site because it was static.

The new site is dynamically built on Wordpress so the index.html file brings up an error. Can I fix this or will I just have to wait until yahoo caches the correct home page.

I've tried searching for a remedy, but can't find anything that solves this problem.

Answer 1

Just install the redirection plugin and create the rule for the index.html file to point to /. That should fix the issue immediately without coding knowledge.

Answer 2

Caching is done on the search engine's servers, so there isn't much you can do about it.

If I had to hazard a guess at the methodology, most search engines probably only re-cache a site after a certain amount of change has occurred. Therefore, your best bet might be restructuring your site's code in a way that common different utilities like diff would see as large changes.

But that's just a guess. Best of luck.

Answer 3

As the other answer mentioned, it is outside your direct control since you are at the mercy of specific search engines re-indexing you.

Each search engine is going to have its own rules, but I would suggest that your switching to WordPress will help in getting it updated. If you went with the standard install of WordPress, it hits ping-o-matic when you publish posts. That is a way to notify various services (although not Bing and Yahoo directly, I believe) that you have an update.

You can submit to ping-o-matic directly as well. Just go there and fill out the form.

You can (and should) sign up for Bing and Google webmaster tools (Yahoo is part of Bing's tools). This will give you an opportunity to let them know you've updated and that you would like to be crawled. It will also give you a chance to know when they have crawled you and what errors they may have encountered (so that you can correct them).

To make yourself even more friendly for being crawled, you should have an XML sitemap. You can submit the location of your sitemap through those tool sites for indexing. If you do not already have an XML sitemap, there are plugins for WordPress that will build it for you. Then all you need to worry about is submitting it.

For your index.html issue, if the site gets reindexed, that should remedy itself. However, if you want to be sure, what you want to use is a 301 redirect message. This tells the bot that it has been moved permanently and they will note that (i.e. you want to let them know that mysite.com/index.html has been permanently moved to mysite.com or something like that).

There are different ways to do that. You could create an index.html that delivers a 301 redirect message; or you could do it with .htaccess. I would lean toward the .htaccess method.