Removing a URL from Search Results
-
I recently renamed a small photography company, and so I transferred the content to the new website, put a 301-redirect on the old website URL, and turned off hosting for that website. But when I search for certain terms that the old URL used to rank highly for (branded terms) the old URL still shows up. The old URL is "www.willmarlowphotography.com" and when you type in "Will Marlow" it often appears in 8th and 9th place on a SERP. So, I have two questions:
First, since the URL no longer has a hosting account associated with it, shouldn't it just disappear from SERPs?
Second, is there anything else I should have done to make the transition smoother to the new URL?
Thanks for any insights you can share.
-
Thanks - yes, I forgot to mention that I did take those two steps, and I'm glad to know that there wasn't a whole lot more I could've done. I
-
It will naturally with time. As you had the 301 redirect in place there's not much else that I would recommend aside from verifying both URL's within Google Webmaster Tools underneath Configuration there's an option to "change address". That tends to make the process a bit less painful.
If you've done that then there's really not mcuh else you could have done.
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
-
Language Specific Characters in URLs for
Hi People, would really appreciate your advice as we are debating best practice and advice seems very subjective depending if we are talking to our dev or SEO team. We are developing a website aimed at the South American market with content entirely in Spanish. This is our first international site so our experience is limited. Should we be using Spanish characters (such as www.xyz.com/contáctanos) in URLs or should we use ASCII character replacements? What are the pros and cons for SEO and usability? Would really be great to get advice from the Moz community and make me look good at the same time as it was my suggestion 🙂 Nick
Technical SEO | | nickspiteri0 -
Duplicate blog URLs in Magenton
On one my sites Moz is picking up 4483 duplicate content pages. The majority of these are from our blog and video sections on our site. We're using a URL shortener and it appears that some of the pages are the full version of the URL then the shortened version. However if you go to the full version you get redirected to the shorter one. So I would assume that the Moz crawler should get the same redirect? We're also getting pagination being shown as duplicate pages, which I would half expect, but the URLs Magento is creating are truly bizarre: e.g http://www.xxx.com/uk/blog/cat/view/identifier/news/page/news/index.php/alarms-doorbells/?p=2 Alarms and doorbells is one of our product categories, which is displayed in the LHN on the blog page but has nothing to do with the blog itself. On another site on the same Magento instance, with the same content (they're for two different regions) we're show as having 248 duplicate pages, again in the video and news section, but this is a completely different scale of issue. Has anyone else encountered issues like these? I'm probably going to put a noindex in place on these two sections until we can get a solution in place as we're completely unranked in google on this site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Website no longer visible Search Results
Overnight my website no longer appears in search engines for the two keywords I use. The website has been nicely climbing up (very steady progress to 42 and 73) the overnight it has vanished off the Radar. I have checked my webmaster account, no messages etc. Please can anyone shed any light on why this has happened? Website is http://www.securityjobsuk.co.uk Many thanks in advance for any help with this. D
Technical SEO | | SJUK0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Results Pages Duplication - What to do?
Hi all, I run a large, well established hotel site which fills a specific niche. Last February we went through a redesign which implemented pagination and lots of PHP / SQL wizzardy. This has left us, however, with a bit of a duplication problem which I'll try my best to explain! Imagine Hotel 1 has a pool, as well as a hot tub. This means that Hotel 1 will be in the search results of both 'Hotels with Pools' and 'Hotels with Hot Tubs', with exactly the same copy, affiliate link and thumbnail picture in the search results. Now imagine this issue occurring hundreds of times across the site and you have our problem, especially since this is a Panda-hit site. We've tried to keep any duplicate content away from our landing pages with some success but it's just all those pesky PHP paginated pages which doing us in (e.g. Hotels/Page-2/?classifications[]263=73491&classifcations[]742=24742 and so on) I'm thinking that we should either a) completely noindex all of the PHP search results or b) move us over to a Javascript platform. Which would you guys recommend? Or is there another solution which I'm overlooking? Any help most appreciated!
Technical SEO | | dooberry0 -
Singular vs plural in urls
In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.? I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0 -
How does google know a search result is a search result?
In the google webmaster forums, google specifically states that you should not include search results in the google index. What is the best way to make dynamic, great content show in search results without receiving a penalty?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Directory URL structure last / in the url
Ok, So my site's urls works like this www.site.com/widgets/ If you go to www.site.com/widgets (without the last / ) you get a 404. My site did no used to require the last / to load the page but it has over the last year and my rankings have dropped on those pages... But Yahoo and BING still indexes all my pages without the last / and it some how still loads the page if you go to it from yahoo or bing, but it looks like this in the address bar once you arrive from bing or yahoo. http://www.site.com/404.asp?404;http://site.com:80/widgets/ How do I fix this? Should'nt all the engines see those pages the same way with the last / included? What is the best structure for SEO?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610