Google suddenly indexing and displaying URLs that haven't existed for years?

[jamestown]

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] |

[jamestown]

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

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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.