Post-Domain Decommission Cleanup
Yesterday a client asked, we moved to a new domain name, but all the pages from the old domains are still in the search engines. What can we do about it?
It appears that the engines have indexed the pages from the old domains, but they are not reindexing those pages. Right now, they are are '301ing' requests for the old domain to a new domain, and most of the pages that were indexed were in the lower levels of Google's Index. The pages are in the Supplemental or Secondary index. The '301' response to the search bot would take care of it, but the engines aren't indexing the site. So, the engines don't know that the pages have changed.
The engines need to reindex the site. This will return the '301' redirects that will update the index.
Since they still owned the domain, they could still establish a webmaster account for the domain with the engine's webmaster tools, and then verify the domain by uploading the validation HTML template.
That can be done at the following URLs:
Bing Webmaster Tools - http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
Google Webmaster Tools - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo SiteExplorer Tools - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Once the validation is done, create a new 'sitemap.xml' file, and submit the sitemap to the search engines. One of my favorite tools to create sitemaps is : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ Point the sitemap starting URL to one of the validation HTML files, and the sitemap will only have one entry.
Once the sitemap is submitted, this will cause the engine to reindex the old domain, thus removing all the older pages in the cache.
