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
-
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are not Indexing in Google
Hello Every one, I have a Wordpress website in which i installed All in SEO plugin and wrote meta titles and descriptions for each and every page and posts and submitted website to index. But after Google crawl the Meta Titles and Descriptions shown by Google are something different that are not found in Content. Even i verified the Cached version of the website and gone through Source code that crawled at that moment. the meta title which i have written is present there. Apart from this, the same URL's are displaying perfect meta titles and descriptions which i wrote in Yahoo and Bing Search Engines. Can anyone explain me how to resolve this issue. Website URL: thenewyou (dot) in Regards,
Technical SEO | | SatishSEOSiren0 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Why are these internal pages not showing any internal links?
If you look at Author profile pages like this one, http://experts.allbusiness.com/author/denise-oberry (THE top contributor on the site with over 82 posts under her belt), or any Author profile page, they show zero internal links or Page Authority. The same goes for most posts for each author on the site. Author pages should show internal links from every post the author has on the site. And specific posts should also have internal links from categories, etc. Yet they show zero. The only posts that show internal links and PA are ones that were either syndicated to the root domain's homepage, or syndicated to Fox Small Business. ZERO internal links. Does anyone know why this is? The root domain does not act this way with Author pages and posts. And I see nothing blocking links or indexing via the robots.txt file or page level nofollow tags. A real head scratcher for this SEO nerd, that I'm sure someone here will have a really simple answer to.
Technical SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
How to stop google from indexing specific sections of a page?
I'm currently trying to find a way to stop googlebot from indexing specific areas of a page, long ago Yahoo search created this tag class=”robots-nocontent” and I'm trying to see if there is a similar manner for google or if they have adopted the same tag? Any help would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Iamfaramon0 -
International Site Links In Footer
We have several international sites and we have them linked in the footer of our main .com site . Should we add "nofollow" to these links? Our concern is that Google could see these sites as a network?
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
Can Google read onClick links?
Can Google read and pass link juice in a link like this? <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="#Link123" onClick="window.open('http://www.mycompany.com/example','Link123')">src="../../img/example.gif"/></a> Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0