Our organization had a complimentary or free homepage when we were
called the
National Kidney Foundation of Virginia. It was free because we used
Compuserve as our ISP and were 'given' a free site/homepage.

For the last year or more we have changed our name to the National
Kidney Foundation of the Virginias because we cover West VA now too.
We have a new site and registered URL to go along with our new name,
but our old name still comes up on search engines in addition to our
new one- whenever our old name is used. (You can't get to the old site
any longer, but the old name still comes up on search engines)

Any suggestion on eliminating the appearance of our old name, or will
it fade away through use because there is no live site/homepage
attached to it any longer?

Art Walker
VP of Operations
NKF of the Virginias
Richmond, VA 804-288-8342

Hi, 

It's unfortunate that the old page is no longer active. To answer your
question directly, there is very little you can do, and it will "fade
away" in time. There are a few things you can do however and I'll list
those here now, and let you know how to "move a site" in the future.

First off, with Google,  Quote from webmaster page:

1. Removing a page from the Google index.
Except in instances involving legal issues or spam, Google's policy
for removing a page from our index requires that we obtain the
permission of that page's webmaster. This prevents competitors from
sabotaging each other's listings. Please have the webmaster for the
page in question contact us with proof that he/she is indeed the
webmaster. This proof must be in the form of a root level page on the
site in question, requesting removal from Google. Once we receive the
URL that corresponds with this root level page, we will remove the
offending page from our index. For more information on this process,
please see ://www.google.com/remove.html.


That will work in a few weeks. 

Now to move a site, Use that option above, but also keep the old one
up for a month or two with a robots.txt file that tells the robots not
to index the site. This will effectivly remove you from all indexes in
that time, and you won't have this problem in the future.

The robots.txt file is just a basic text (not a MS Word or WordPerfect
file, just text like from notepad) that has these two lines in it :

user-agent: *
disallow: /

http://www.freefind.com/library/howto/robots/

But that's for next time. The Google page will also remove the old
site from yahoo and AskJeeves, since they are now the same engine.

Thanks, 

webadept-ga

Though I believe your question was answered correctly, I thought I
would suggest the following:

don't try to remove the page from searches. If certain people don't
know that your name has changed, removing those searches from finding
you is akin to turning away old customers. I have a website akddr.com.
Before I had a domain name, my site was hosted off msn communities,
communities.msn.com/dancedancerevolutionanchorage. (A bad url!). Even
though my main site is directed to by most searches, it is still
useful that people go to my old site (which has a big banner saying
"we've moved to ... click here!"), since it shows up for searches that
my new site does not show up for. In that way, you can get valuable
traffic to your site by maintaining a redirect page at the old url (as
it sounds you are doing).

I hope you found this advice helpful.