Should I deindex my pages?
-
I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place.
Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.
-
Glad to hear it! Yeah, patience isn't easy, that's for sure.
-
Good the hear it went well.
Dr Peat,
Had some great advice.
glad to know it's working.
Thomas
-
Thanks for replying. As it happens, I checked wmt this morning and found that all of the old pages had been deindexed on their own (with the exception of 2 that had not been 301'd - they've been sorted now) and there are now no duplicate title warnings. The site is also looking better in SERPs.
You are right, I just needed to wait a few weeks and show some patience. Its quite easy to get impatient when justifying our cost to a client.
Thanks again.
-
Just checking in - has the situation improved in the month since you posted the question? I tend to agree with Thomas that it's usually just a waiting game, assuming the 301-redirects are working properly. It never hurts to use a header checker, just in case (it's amazing how often redirects get implemented poorly).
You could re-create the old sitemap if the transition is stalled. I'd avoid actively removing the old URLs, as that could interfere with making sure the link equity from the old URLs passes to the new ones. The only issue would be if you suspect duplicate content problems are harming you.
The devil is in the details on these situations, and it depends a lot on the size of the site, etc.
-
I do not know how big your old site was however if you have just done this you may see some overflow as the website cache has yet to die away on the old site.
You can always use the way back machine or archive.com/.org I know it's one of the two
after that follow the guide in Moz along with using a tool like screaming spider frog SEO the free version covers 500 pages for free however the Pro version is required to do redirects but makes it so easy it's well worth it.
That Way you can find your old site the way it was. And what the names of links Used to be. However if you have correctly 301 redirected the old links to the new site. Meaning equivalent pages then this should not be an issue. You have to allow Google time to index your website as well as the index for your old site. Get rid of I would use the tool in Google Webmaster tools and tell Google that you have moved your website this will allow it to be indexed or for quickly. However it may be complicated to have that happen without a new domain.
It does not sound like a crisis to me. However only you know how you conducted the 301 redirects.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Brand domain not in 1st page
Hi, I've made an e-commerce (drsebagh.it) for the italian division of the brand Dr Sebagh. Now if I search the brand query on google.it (https://www.google.it/search?q=dr+sebagh&oq=dr+sebagh&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l3j0l3.1352j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8) the site is around the 3rd serp. I can't find where problems are. No duplicate content (as my client says and Copyscape Free seems to confirm that) also Webmaster Tools doesn't signal errors... Can someone helps me to do a quickly check?
Technical SEO | | YouON0 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
PR of homepage when other pages have more lniks
This is going to sound like such a newbie question. I don't know how I've been doing SEO all this time and haven't come across the answer. It's usually true that a homepage will have the most backlinks, but what if it doesn't? What if an internal page has more links? Is it possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than a homepage? Additionally, if I do on-page SEO for many internal pages of my site, will it only help those particular pages or will it give the whole site a boost, thus making the homepage rank higher in the SERPS?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0