Here's a weird situation. I've got a client, Hibiscus Florals, and they're having difficulty getting their site properly crawled and into the main index due to a large number of links in the supplementals.

I noticed that at least part of the reason was because many of these links were non-www. based and Google seemed to struggle to crawl them properly. (I'm not sure if it's the whole reason, but having noticed very different results for the www. and non-www. versions, I'm sure it's at least part.)

So...what I did was to redirect all users to the www. version of the pages I could (and to the index otherwise, for pages that were from the old version of the site pre-2005) using ASP and 301 redirects. I've got all that in place, but what I don't know is how to get Google to recrawl the non-www. links to get rid of them other than by submitting them manually, and I really don't think that doing so is in my best interests because it could be interpreted as spamming.

I'm not really sure what else to do, having never been in a situation like this before. Any ideas? Thanks.

Update: figured out that I could include a sitemap with the old URLs to get them recrawled and removed. Gonna see how it works.

The 301 redirect may take 6 months or more to show an effect, what will help the process along is getting some new decent quality links to the www version.
Where possible get any external links to the non-www updated, if you can't do worry about it the 301 will eventually take care of it.

<general comment>
What many webmasters/SEO etc fail to realise is that using a redirect is not the instantaneous effect with SEs as it is with browsers.
The original use of HTTP redirect responses are for direct access user agents and cacheing proxies and as such work perfectly.
Internet Search Engines came along later and have implemented redirects to suit their needs. Yahoo seems to conform closely to the caching proxy model where it only takes a short while to change the indexed URIs. Google on the other hand does take a lot longer. Probably due in part to the nature of their data storage, where there is no single point of failure and the data is spread over many machines, with many replicating clusters of machines , in many datacenters.

chrishirst: that's actually the next/present step...getting those IBLs. Going to try that over the next few days.

Between that, and what I'm trying now, I'll post back...if this is what I think this is, it's actually pretty simple and could work for others.

Apologies for intentional vagueness, but I don't have enough information myself yet to be able to make statements.

problem is with SEs you never really know if it's what you did that made the difference.

But you are right in not saying what you are trying before you see something change (one way or another)

Just out of interest are you using Google sitemaps, because there is a train of thought at HR where there seems to be some correlation between sites suffering the "big daddy syndrome" as it's been dubbed and sitemaps.

I'll post the thread link when I come across it.

<edit>
doesn't take long when you read two forums at once

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=22893
start at around post No7
</edit>

chrishirst: I can't really answer that question as clearly as you'd like without revealing more than I'd like to.

However, I will say this: Sitemaps is a part of my experiment.