Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Will Google Recrawl an Indexed URL Which is No Longer Internally Linked?
-
We accidentally introduced Google to our incomplete site. The end result: thousands of pages indexed which return nothing but a "Sorry, no results" page. I know there are many ways to go about this, but the sheer number of pages makes it frustrating.
Ideally, in the interim, I'd love to 404 the offending pages and allow Google to recrawl them, realize they're dead, and begin removing them from the index. Unfortunately, we've removed the initial internal links that lead to this premature indexation from our site.
So my question is, will Google revisit these pages based on their own records (as in, this page is indexed, let's go check it out again!), or will they only revisit them by following along a current site structure?
We are signed up with WMT if that helps.
-
What we run into often is that on larger sites there 1) still are internal links to those pages from old blog posts etc. You have to really scrub your site to find those and manually update. I am only mentioning this as unless you used a tool to crawl the site and looked at it with a fine toothed comb, you might be surprised to find the links you missed 2) there are still external links to those pages. That said, even if 1 and 2 are not met, Google will still recrawl (although not as often). Google assumes that any initial 404 or even 301 may be a temporary error and so checks back. I have seen urls that we removed over a year ago, Google will still ping them. They really hang onto stuff. I have not gone as far as the 301 to a directory that I deindex, but generally just watch to see them show up and then fall out of Webmaster Tools and then I move on.
-
Right, but having lots of 404's that are still indexed probably isn't good for your site in general. If you wanted them de-indexed, 301'ing them to a new folder and filing a single removal request for that entire directory would probably work.
Thanks for the help. I've heard from a few people that they will recrawl these pages again even if nothing is linking to them. That's reassuring. Thanks all.
-
No reason other than finding all those 404 pages and doing individual URL removals for each isn't a very productive task. 404s generally have no impact on search rankings.
-
Interesting. Any reason why you haven't simply filed a removal request? I feel if there's too many to manually do, you could 301 them to a specific directory and then manually remove that directory all at once?
-
Hi Martijn,
Thanks for the response. I must apologize as I left out an important detail. While are pages are "No results" and basically useless to the user, they're not actually 404'd pages. They're live, valid pages that basically offer nothing.
As I stated earlier, 404'ing them would be ideal for us if we could be sure Google would recrawl them. I am hesitant due to uncertainty of Googlebot re-crawling unlinked internal links. Our deeper pages like these have not been updated/recrawled yet, so I'm a bit unsure as to how likely they will.
I guess I should just go ahead and 404 all of them now and see what happens, since it can't hurt. Just curious about Googlebot in general since it always helps to know more!
-
Don't count on Google dropping those 404ing pages from the index any time soon. We have pages that have 404d for over a year and they're still in the index.
-
They'll eventually drop these pages as they already know where to find them and as they give the proper 404 header they know that's a sign to drop them. In most cases pages that 404 are already not linked from any other pages so that will also be a sign to search engines that the specific pages aren't important anymore.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What could cause Google to not honor canonical URLs?
I have a strange situation on a website, when I do a Google query of site:example.com all the top indexed results appear to be queries that users can perform on the website. So any random term the user searches for on the website for some reason is causing the search result page to get indexed - like example.com/search/query/random-keywords However, the search results page has a canonical tag on it that points to example.com/search, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything. Any thoughts or ideas why this could be happening?
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Trailing slash URLs and canonical links
Hi, I've seen a fair amount of topics speaking about the difference between domain names ending with or without trailing slashes, the impact on crawlers and how it behaves with canonical links.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
However, it sticks to domain names only.
What about subfolders and pages then? How does it behaves with those? Say I've a site structured like this:
https://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com/page1 And for each of my pages, I've an automatic canonical link ending with a slash.
Eg. rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/page1/" /> for the above page. SEM Rush flags this as a canonical error. But is it exactly?
Are all my canonical links wrong because of that slash? And as subsidiary question, both domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/ are accessible. Is it this a mistake or it doesn't make any difference (I've read that those are considered different pages)? Thanks!
G0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
Abnormally high internal link reported in Google Search Console not matching Moz reports
If I'm looking at our internal link count and structure on Google Search Console, some pages are listed as having over a thousand internal links within our site. I've read that having too many internal links on a page devalues that page's PageRank, because the value is divided amongst the pages it links out to. Likewise, I've heard having too many internal links is just bad in general for SEO. Is that true? The problem I'm facing is determining how Google is "discovering" these internal links. If I'm just looking at one single page reported with, say, 1,350 links and I'm just looking at the code, it may only have 80 or 90 actual links. Moz will confirm this, as well. So why would Google Search Console report different? Should I be concerned about this?
Technical SEO | | Closetstogo0 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Google will index us, but Bing won't. Why?
Bing is crawling our site, but not indexing it, and we cannot figure out why -- plus it's being indexed fine in Google. Any ideas on what the issue with Bing might be? Here's are some details to let you know what we've already checked/established: We have 4 301’s and the rest of our site checks out We’ve already established our Robots is ok, and that we are fixing our site map/it's in fine shape We do not see anything blocking bingbot access to the site There is no varnish or any load balancers, so nothing on that end that would be blocking the access We also don't see any rules in the apache or the .htaccess config that would be blocking the access
Technical SEO | | Alex_RevelInteractive1 -
How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED
We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google. See the screenshot for an example. The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index. Are there extra steps we should take? So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map. ^802D799E5372F02797BE19290D8987F3E248DCA6656F8D9BF6^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110