301 redirect hell.... How do you de-commission an old site

[AABAB]

Hi SEO experts:

We operate a vacation rental website and around 1 year ago moved to a different platform. Because our pages are arranged by location (what we refer to as Locales) we need to put 301 redirects for all the old locale pages.  So for example:

www.example.com/__Skeggness.cfm redirects to www.example/com/vacation-rentals/locale/skeggness

But here's the problem: We can't seem to get Google to drop those old __{locale_name}.cfm pages... even after over 12-months of the new site going live!

Other clues we've noticed:

• The old underscore URLs show up in our SERP sub-links

• Sometimes google shows the new page title and description but attributes it to the __{locale_name}.cfm URL (aghh!!!)

One suggestion we received was to use the URL removal tool in Google WMT.... But given we have 1,000's of locales i don't see that as being affective.

Questions:

1. Any suggestions on how to get Google to drop these old URLs and use the new ones?

2. Is this situation hurting our SEO? Or do you think its benign... and I should just take a deep breath.... and relax at little more...

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi AABAB,

This is pretty common. Unfortuneatly, Google can keep your old URLs around for a long time, especially pages without much authority.

And yes, this can have a negative impact on your SEO - especially if Google in situations where Google is indexing both the old and new URLs, and hasn't processed the 301.

Muhammed has a good suggestion. Create or put up a sitemap of your old URLs, and submit this sitemap to Google via Webmaster Tools. The idea is that Google will re-crawl these URLs, finally register the 301, and drop those pages from the index.

The URL removal tool would be a great option if all the pages are in the same directory, such as /old-pages/xxxxx, as Google allows you to remove entire directories in bulk. But unfortunately it looks like your URLs are all at the root, so this isn't an option.

Regardless, hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[riyas_heych]

I hope you can do the same for this situation also.

All we needed to to do is make Google to visit your OLD URLs for a last time and let it know that its 301'd to another URL.

So keep all your OLD URLs in HTML sitemap (not XML) until Google cache it again.

Also check when is the last date Google cached your OLD URLs

[AABAB]

Thanks Muhammed:

A little bit of a different situation i think as you're referring to moving from one domain to another domain right?  In our situation we're keeping domain - but all the URLs are changed from one site structure to another.

Also, nothing of the old site remains.  We can't really run the two platforms side-by-side under the same domain.

[riyas_heych]

Hi

I had this same issue with one of my website before.

Steps I done

1. Created 301 from all the other pages except the home page

2. Created a temporary Home page/ Landing page for telling human visitors that my old domain is moved to newdomain.com.

3) Created a HTML Sitemap in OLD domain for all the current indexed OLD URLs (everything is already redirected to newdomain.com) and placed it in olddomain.com/sitemap.html

At this time the only available 202 pages in my OLD site is the 1) Home page & 2) The HTML sitemap page

4. Created/Edit the current XML sitemap (OLD Site). Included only the above two pages/links in the XML sitemap. Updated the XML sitemap from Web Master Tools.

5. Waited 1-2 months. All my URLs got removed from SERP

6. At this stage I created 301 redirect to the remaining Home & Sitemap Page

Done!

I'm not sure this is a best practice or not, But it worked for me. Consider others feedback before doing this