Removing old URLs from Google
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Hello, I am sure that this question has been asked many times, but I am still not sure what to do about the following:
Our site's URL structure has changed a few times in the past few months. Recenty, we have changed our URLs to become more SEO friendly. However, Google has indexed the old URLs as well. To give an example:
The following page in our website shows the following URLs in Google Webmaster Tools:
/artigo/68_38/2/as_religioes_iv_confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/1_14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/_14_6132/Vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/ensino/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/The correct URL is the last one. What should I do about the other ones? Almost all the pages in our website have this problem. We have redirected the old URLs to the new ones, but is there anything else we should do? We were asking Google to remove them, but Google has informed us that it has reached the limit.
Please advise us on waht we should do. We have removed the old sitemap with the old URLs. What else must we do?
Thank you very much.
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Google will naturally update the URLs with the new ones if you followed the above steps. There is no need for you to take any other action.
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Thank you very much for your help.
So there is no need to remove the URLs from Google?
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If you properly 3xx redirect an old page to a new page, Google will update their records usually within 30 days. There are some things you can do to help ensure the process goes smoothly:
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make sure you do NOT block any of these pages with robots.txt, as Google would then not crawl the pages and therefore not find the redirect
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make sure you do NOT "noindex" any of the redirected pages
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update all of the internal links on your site to ensure they go to the final target page.
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update your sitemap to reflect the new page
Other then these steps, you just need a bit of patience.
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