Removing old URLs from Google
-
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.
-
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.
-
Thank you very much for your help.
So there is no need to remove the URLs from Google?
-
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:
-
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
-
make sure you do NOT "noindex" any of the redirected pages
-
update all of the internal links on your site to ensure they go to the final target page.
-
update your sitemap to reflect the new page
Other then these steps, you just need a bit of patience.
-
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
-
Snippet showed in google search is not from metaDescription
This is my page https://www.collegehippo.com/graduate-school/programs/top-ranked-masters-degree-museum-museology-and-curatorial-studies The metaDescription is | |
On-Page Optimization | | etattva
| name="description" content="Master's degree in Museum, Museology and Curatorial Studies is offered by 49 American universities. New York University had highest number of international students receiving a Master's degree. Johns Hopkins University had the most women graduates in this program. Job outlook for Museum, Museology and Curatorial Studies Museum, Museology and Curatorial Studies is projected to grow 13 percent from 2016 to 2026, faster than average for all occupations. Median pay for Museum, Museology and Curatorial Studies in 2018 was $53,360. The number of jobs were 11170. Check out best universities offering online Master's program in Museum, Museology and Curatorial Studies "/> |
| | | But when I see the page in google search results for (museum studies graduate programs), This is how it appears in the search results. It is showing the breadcrumbs from the page. I am not sure why is google is treating the page like this. It was not like that 5 months back. Nothing much changed in page and google is displaying the page content like this . How can I fix this?0 -
Url too long
Hi we have a wordpress website for Office Furniture Our domain name does not have office furniture in it. So we went from having domain.com/shop/category/second-sub-cat to domain.com/office-furniture/category/second-category However we now have 509 products flagged with too long urls I am wondering whether we should change back : For example domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks Should I go back to domain.com/shop/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks Or am I going to confuse matters even more? I should say this only affects categories as the products themselves are /shop/product I am just concerned that changing the re-direct in place originally will just make matters worse and confuse things - would I get more value changing back? Or should I stick with it and just try to shorten urls individually by product titles etc
On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD860 -
Website Titles in Google
I currently have a Wordpress platform website and previously I noticed that when I optimized my pages, if I indicated what I wanted my page names to be (through an application like SEO Yoast) that most times, the keyword would show up exactly how I had it typed in. Recently I have noticed that the title of my website is showing in my page titles too. So for example: Before: Shoe Stores Windsor - XYZ Company Now: XYZ Company | Shoe Stores Windsor - XYZ Company In SEO practices, I know it's most often best to have the keyword you would like as close to the front of your title tag, but now this recent search adds my website title first. Plus this also seems to be making my titles longer. I know Google ultimately has the 'final say' in a page title and I have ensured that I have the "rewrite titles/descriptions option" check in Wordpress to allow me to overwrite titles, but I am hoping someone can possibly provide me with a tip or trick to avoid this in search rankings. I think it's important to have the name of my site entered through Wordpress so that any pages that I have no optimized default to the page name and site name, but the ones I have optimized seem to be showing differently all of a sudden. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Dissapeared from Google - Urgent
We are new to the whole SEO thing and could be described as total numpties as we have hidden away from it, scared of what it means and what might happen if we open that can of worms. But after seeing a 25% drop in visitors over a year, and a continued fall, we thought we better try and get our heads around what we need to do to improve our chances on google. Consequently we have signed up to MOZ and are exploring its crawl results and trying to learn and action things. Today we noticed that we have dropped fairly completely from Google for many of our top key words. We are based in Italy,our site is in Italian and we only target Italy. Our homepage is http://www.shoechic,it and two of our top keywords that have dissapeared are: "scarpe sexy" & "Scarpe Pleaser" We would love to hear if anyone can throw some light in why this dramatic change may have taken place and what we can do to address it. Many thanks in advance for anyones help and advice. Philip
On-Page Optimization | | shoechic0 -
Google picking up old pages
I recently redesigned a site that had all the keywords it was ranking for going to the home page. Now I have specific pages for each of these keywords but I'm seeing the home page (not the page that, if I do an on page optimization by hand in MOZ gives me an A rating) showing up in the auto reports (assuming pages Google sees for these keywords related to the url) as F's. They're all pointing to the home page. I've redirected the old index.html home page to the new but I suspect the reason is actually these pages (were) ranking for these terms (though none too well - all but one were not in the top 50 and one was 45) because these rankings are all dropping as well. I'm at a loss, with the site replaced, as to how to correct this and tell Google these keyword phrases all have their own pages now. I've dug through this forum and the only applicable answer I can see would be to add these phases to the home page (where they all rank for now) with anchored links to their new (A rated by Moz for these terms when I hand enter them) singular pages? Or is it just a waiting game?
On-Page Optimization | | adworksofboca0 -
Submitting URLs to Bing and Google
Does Submitting URLs to Bing and Google actually do anything? Is it worthwhile? What I mean is submitting intermittently individual URLS after already submitting the sitemap.
On-Page Optimization | | FCAbroad0 -
Recommendation: Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.
Please clarify: In the page optimization tool, seomoz recommends using the canonical url tag on the unique page itself. Is it the same canonical url tag used when want juice to go to the original page? Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today. Please give example.
On-Page Optimization | | AllIsWell0 -
Moving our current homepage to a new URL
Our homepage currently speaks to a specific product and we're re-doing our homepage to be more about the brand which links to the product. The current home page has PA of 62 with thousands of links to the page. Question is are there any best practices around this or any risks? So current page is: www.xyz.com which we will be refreshing then moving the existing content to www.xyz.com/product so all the subdirectories gets shifted over 1 Thank in advance for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0