Google suddenly indexing and displaying URLs that haven't existed for years?
-
We recently noticed google is showing approx 23,000 indexed .jsp urls for our site. These are ancient pages that haven't existed in years and have long been 301 redirected to valid urls. I'm talking 6 years.
Checking the serps the other day (and our current SEOMoz pro campaign), I see that a few of these urls are now replacing our correct ones in the serps for important, competitive phrases.
What the heck is going on here?
Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects?
Here's an example of the rewrite rules that we've used for 6+ years:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301]
Now, this 'bottom paint' url has been incredibly stable in the serps for over a half decade. All of a sudden, a google search for 'bottom paint' (no quotes) brings up the jsp page at position 2-3.
This is just one example of something very bizarre happening. Has anyone else had something similar happen lately?
Thank You
<colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>
| RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] | -
Oleg
Thank you for the reply. I am going to submit to G as well. What's really interesting is that for some of those ancient pages that have somehow resurfaced, you can view the cache dates. Those pages seem to have cache dates from late nov and dec 2012. But for others, attempting to view the cached version yields a google 404!
IMO, this suggests to its a bug.
As an aside, you are certainly correct about canonical and pagination issues on our site. We have implemented canonical thus far only on product pages (over 10k prod pages), and I've had getting next/prev for pagination of subcategories as a top priority for months now.
Thanks
-
Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects?
Shouldn't be.. pretty odd. You can try blocking the crawler from accessing the old .jsp pages if they all follow a format (below code is if every page starts with /xref_)
User-agent:*
Disallow: /xref_*Looks like you don't really need a RewriteRule line there.. just a redirect would do the trick
Redirect 301 /xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp /userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID
But I don't think that is the problem since its still sending a 301 response code when you visit the .jsp file.
One thing that may help is adding canonical tags to your current pages - make sure you utilize rel=canonical as well as rel=next/prev for your paginated pages.
Overall, I'm not sure =/ Try posting/submitting it to G, could be a bug.
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
-
Google Indexing
Hi We have roughly 8500 pages in our website. Google had indexed almost 6000 of them, but now suddenly I see that the pages indexed has gone to 45. Any possible explanations why this might be happening and what can be done for it. Thanks, Priyam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
Site still indexed after request 'change of address' search console
Hello, A couple of weeks ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
Which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
Hi, I hope anyone can help me with this issue. Our french domain experienced a huge drop of indexed URLs in 2012. More than 50k URLs were indexed, after the drop less than 10k were counted. I would like to check what happened here and which URLs were thrown out of the index. So I was thinking about a comparison between todays data and the data of 2012. Unfortunately we don't have any data on the indexed pages in 2012 beside the number of indexed pages. Is there any way to check, which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandra_h0 -
Most recent blog post isn't being indexed?
http://www.howlatthemoon.com/dueling_piano_bar/kids-activities-denver/ Even if I put the URL into Google it doesn't show up....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Google showing high volume of URLs blocked by robots.txt in in index-should we be concerned?
if we search site:domain.com vs www.domain.com, We see: 130,000 vs 15,000 results. When reviewing the site:domain.com results, we're finding that the majority of the URLs showing are blocked by robots.txt. They are subdomains that we use as production environments (and contain similar content as the rest of our site). And, we also find the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 541 already displayed." SEER Interactive mentions that this is one way to gauge a Panda penalty: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/100-panda-recovery-what-we-learned-to-identify-issues-get-your-traffic-back We were hit by Panda some time back--is this an issue we should address? Should we unblock the subdomains and add noindex, follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Can you see the 'indexing rules' that are in place for your own site?
By 'index rules' I mean the stipulations that constitute whether or not a given page will be indexed. If you can see them - how?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0