Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
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I'll keep this one short and sweet
Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL.
The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results.
This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages.
I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index.
Many thanks
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Many thanks for your response. The 301's were implemented around April 2012 - There were a couple of URL's which were missed however and this would probably explain the cached versions that you've picked up on.
I've just checked two dozen URL's at random and have only picked up on three pages that are cached and these are the first three results on the first page. The remaining pages don't seem to have cached versions available which would insinuate that Google hasn't been able to crawl them for some time.
I've just set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore the dispmode variable so thanks for the heads up on this feature which I've completely glazed over in the past. On the assumption that the 301's were set up correctly would you imagine that configuring WMT do disallow crawling of these pages would speed up the removal process?
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How long ago did you implement the 301 redirects? I just checked the Google cache of one of the dispmode URLs and the page was cached on December 24th, 2012 for the URL. If the 301s were put in place prior to December 24th, then Google should have followed the 301 redirect instead of caching that version of the page.
My suggestion would be to configure the parameters with Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google not to index the URLs with the dispmode parameter.
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