New site design. Affect on search engines?

[redlinemaxed]

i had my site(Redline Maxed - Car Styling, Gear Knobs, Aerials and Vehicle Lighting) re-designed. I have switched hosting companies and the new site is online now. However, i was wondering what search engines will think of this. All of the old URL's (Except the home page) are inactive now but obviously still indexed by search engines.

Is there anything i need to do to kind of let search engines know that the site has changed and all of the old URL's are now invalid?

thanks in advance!

[SkinnerW]

Have you changed site structure or just moved it to different server?

[redlinemaxed]

Completely new structure. Basically started from scratch but used the old domain.

[SkinnerW]

There is not much you can do about it now...

Old invalid urls will be dropped from index in a few month.

I would suggest create xml sitemap and submit it to Google for faster indexing of new pages...

[redlinemaxed]

yeah, i have two sitemaps in webmaster tools. One for categories and one for products.

Do you know how long it should take for Google to index the new URL's? I have also uploaded the products to base, which i hope will speed things up

[SkinnerW]

Usually they indexed all my new sites within a week or less if sitemap is there. If not - may take forever...

[redlinemaxed]

ok great, its only been online a couple of days so i'm sure all will work out. thanks for your help!

[TheeCommerceConsultant]

If you are on a linux server that will let you support htaccess and you have a list of all the old page names you can set up what is called 301 redirect on all old pages to the equivelent new pages. for example

redirect 301 /old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

this will let the search engine know that the old page is permenatly gone and this is the new page.

Never tried it when the host has moved aswell and of course will ONLY work on linux where you can use .htaccess

Unfortunatly if you were on a windows server you need to edit every single page individually so changing host and unless you are on your own server will not be possible.

Other than that sitemap feed is way to go and ofcourse making sure all your pages are complient. Well worth doing a nice 404 page not found in your own branding, again not all hosts will allow you to do this but at least it looks better than a normal 404.

hth