Where did all the Rootsweb pages go?
For years, USGenWeb was graciously given free server space for their completely free state and county sites by an organization called Rootsweb. A number of years ago, Rootsweb was purchased by the same company that owns Ancestry.com. Recently this company made some changes in the way their URL render. The new URL for these pages is rootsweb.ancestry.com
Since perception is everything, a number of the volunteers of the USGenweb sites were uncomfortable with the fact that the ancestry.com name is now part of their URL. As such, the volunteers began moving their sites to different servers and new URLs. Since ancestry.com does not allow proper redirection of websites using conventional methods, the search engines are now experiencing thousands of bad links relating to the genealogy world.
I am in the process of writing to all the major search engines, explaining the situation, asking them to index these new pages more often and faster….in hopes to get the genealogy community back into the major search engines.
Sorry for any problems any of you are experiencing. If it relates to a Wisconsin Page, please let me know and I will see if I can find out where the pages went.