I thought I had written a post about 6 or 7 months back about the speed of indexing a newly-designed site with new page URLs on an existing domain – comparing the speed at which new pages were added to the visible index in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I just spent ten minutes looking for it and can’t find it – so apparently I’m going mad.
Anyhow, this time I’ve got a much smaller site. The domain was registered 1-2 years ago and the site was live, although was not heavily promoted and did not get much traffic, but it was indexed. The site has been recently redesigned and the motivation behind it has been recently renewed.
I’ve found that of the “big three” search engines, MSN was the fastest this time. MSN has updated its index of the homepage several times, each within only about 2 days of the homepage changing. Also, some new pages were added that were linked off the homepage and MSN has indexed all of them (less than 10 total).
Google is next, as they’ve updated the homepage to reflect what was there about 6-8 days ago, but no more recent than that. They don’t have any of the new pages indexed, and are still showing a bunch of old URLs that have not been linked to from the homepage or more than 1 or 2 deep pages on the site for several weeks using the site:www.website.com search command.
Yahoo this time is bringing up the rear. Their cached version of the page is about 2-3 weeks old.
I’ll try and keep you posted as this progresses. The site will be adding more pages over time.