2 domains + 1 website = 3 questions

Hi,

1)
my original domain www.chocolateriewanders.com is too hard to pronounce and spell/remember, so i also got www.dcconfections.com ....
i just forward all the traffic to the original domain, without having any other info (or space really) on the newer domain.
Is that called a 301 redirect? (i configured the forwarding w/ my provider) And am I right in thinking that it doesn't affect SEO/ranking at all?

following question has been answered by 'Gnome101' and 'Hombre' - thanx ;-)
2)
I updated my site, which was a framed site and converted it into a site using CSS and no more frames. Now, various search engines still have the old pages (frames) cached and show them in results ....
How can i change this? (and if i cannot, then how long approx. till these disappear?)

3)
Before I had my own webspace on this continent, I used my dads over in germany. Some search engines still pull the page up in results ... well, I didn't really delete it - rather i made a splash-page and have a redirect there, which waits 10 seconds and then directs to the new address.
Shall i go ahead and delete the redirecting page? I really don't want it in search results anymore ...


following question has been answered by 'ran_dizolph' - thanx ;-)
and okay, a 4th question .... i did submit my site to dmoz.org yesterday, but never got an email or so .... do they not respond ?(i left an email address) ... just wondering, because i would love to check on my submission status ....

thank you for reading

All i will touch on is ur dmoz question.

don't hold your breath about your 'submission status'. The first site i submitted there was over a year ago, and it's still not listed. It's possible that there's a 25+ month waiting period...that, and dmoz is reportadely not all that important to get into anymore.

they definately don't send an email response.

HTH

if properly configured (with your provider) a 301 will not affect your SEO.

I just did the change from frames to tables/CSS.

Here is what happended with me.

I took the site, and left the old framed pages where they were, for if I removed them, the site to all search engines would be dead. This created a problem becasue google would hit my old contect that was still on the server, and direct people to that. So what I did, was make a custom 404 page that had links on it explaining what was going on, and how my customers could contunie using the site. I also replaces the graphic on the pages with a "you are on the old site, plese goto NEW URL to see our brand new site...ect.....

Then after about 2 week, I started deleting the old framed pages. I carefully watched traffic to make sure that I wasn't loseing mass amounts of people


Then I gave google a site map. I really think this helped becasue if gave google a link map of what new content I had, and also made sure the old content wasn't being hit.

I think deleted all framed material from the site. Traffic dropped a little, but once google had that site map all was ok.

If you are going to do this, just keep an eye on site:yoururl to see how many pages google has indexed. If the number falls(which it should as I assume you had more pages displaying the same content) and then doesn't come back up, keep giving google the sitemap.

For me, I am in month 4.5 of changing, and google STILL has some of my framed content in results. I am talking only about 10 pages out of 1500, but it will take a while for the stuff to come out.

On an SEO note, my SERPS have increased in some areas, and stayed relativly the same in others. While changing out of frames is a good idea for development of the site, it's not an instant result maker.

hey gnome,
thank you for your response ... one question:
What do you mean with "i gave google my sitemap" - how did you do that?

i am not at all in google right now .... while i am on yahoo and msn in the first results for 'artisan chocolate washington dc' ..... grrrrrrr google

although i still have time and i think that is a good factor for appearing in google

Hi Kaskudoo

Google site map is an xml file that sites in your root directory and contains links that are on your index page, this is spydered by google frequently and may help your listings.
It's free to join and easy to apply. Take a look here for more info.

If your not sure about coding an XML file there is a cool free site map generator here that does the hard work and produces site maps that google accept.

Hope this helps

ATB

ahhhh, thanks you two!

i created, submitted and already verified the sitemap and google did indeed crawl it

very cool ... although i also installed a php counter/traffic analyzer and it didn't register a spider yet (google probably just crawled the xml file)

... but thats good to know that google got my attention now

Tried the sitemap generator and I get this error. Am I missing something?

Des

The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

Invalid at the top level of the document. Error processing resource 'http://www.ranvet.com.au/sitemapspal.xml'. Line 1, Po...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

mh, don't know? .... my xml starts with


there are tools out there that test your xml file on validity