Duplicate Pages on GWT when redesigning website
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Hi, we recently redesigned our online shop. We have done the 301 redirects for all product pages to the new URL (and went live about 1.5 week ago), but GWT indicated that the old product URL and the new product URL are 2 different pages with the same meta title tags (duplication) - when in fact, the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL when visited.
I found this article on google forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/CvCjeNOxOUw
It says we either just wait for Google to re-crawl, of use the fetch URL function for the OLD URLs. Question is, after i fetch the OLD URL to tell Google that it's being redirected, should i click the button 'submit to index' or not? (See screengrab - please note that it was the OLD URL that was being fetched, not the NEW URL). I mean, if i click this button, is it telling Google that:a. 'This old URL has been redirected, therefore please index the new URL'? or
b. 'Please keep this old URL in your index'?What's your view on this? Thanks
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Hi,
I migrated a load of product category pages on one of my websites recently to cleaner URLs and to force the crawl I submitted the new URLs (and children) to index via WMT. This was to pick them up quickly - and it worked (within seconds). The old URLs appearing were never a problem. However there are limits to the number of times you can do this so that might be a sticking point for your solution as I'm guessing you have lots of products. Try it with one page (a low traffic and selling product!) and see what happens - and let us know.
It's possible Google is holding onto your old URLs because they have a number of inbound links and the crawl will eventually catch up to only display the new URLs if you give it time.
Aside from agreeing with the sitemap submission suggestion, I'd also triple check that your 301s / canonicals are set up properly on your website's old URLs by firing Screaming Frog or another crawler at it.
George
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Have you resubmitted your sitemap? That is a slightly simpler step. Personally I would wait for the pages to be indexed. This should really only take about 2 weeks. The SERP might reflect the old site until then, but if your rankings are good then that is a good thing for your SEO.
I don't think that fetching in this case will correctly reindex your site. The wait and see game is going to be your best chance at getting the natural response you want from Google without sacrificing your existing rankings.
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Honestly speaking, I am sick of this Google Webmaster Tool delay in update… most of the time it shows me the days of months old when the website will be completely changed it will still talking about the old problems…
My first suggestion is to wait and I believe after few crawls it will understand that they have moved on from the problem you had before.
The image you attached will only tell you if the redirection is properly working or not and if the user is shorting from old page to the new one that means it is working.
I believe another thing you people can do is to give a social bump to your new pages and at the same time request Google to de-index the page. GWT have this option somewhere.
Hope this helps!
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Sorry, forgot to attach.
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