Do you know how long Google waits between scans of your site?
And why would it matter?
Well, imagine that you buy a shiny new URL and want your old websites traffic to go there instead (quite reasonably). The easiest way to do this is to put up some simple redirect pages (either HTTP redirect Meta tag or Javascript), and this works fine for the first, what, month? Then all of a sudden traffic drops like a stone to almost nothing and all your lovely graphics disappear from Google Image Search (the source of most of my traffic it seems).
Disaster!
Two weeks of farting around with Google SiteMaps and my graphics and hits still have not returned even though they are on the website, so time for something of a cudgel, in that the text of the old website and the links to the graphics are all going back in at the bottom of the redirect pages, in the hope that Google might get the idea that this contents still actually exists and re-index it.
Nothing dishonest at all, but I really, really need my graphics back on Google, since the new site’s graphics don’t seem to be indexed at all.
Another 2 weeks and it will be a month since the earthquake (and it took a month for Google to drop the graphics, so lets hope things return to normal then…
