Site Search Results in Index -- Help
-
Hi,
I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.)
Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed.
I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links.
But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be:
Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?)
Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good?
Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability.
Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
-
Thanks for the response James.
The 301 redirect makes sense.
Maybe you know the answer to this question b/c I was thinking of this as a possible solution the other day. The correct URL pages have canonical tags on them, so what would happen if I were just to cut and paste the correct URLs over the incorrect URLs within the navi. page? Would that make duplicate content issues, b/c internally the correct URLs are live, but the SERP results would still be for the incorrect URLs? Is the canonical tag too weak of a signal in that case? Would the SERPs eventually drop those indexed search pages?
Thanks again for the help, as you see I am still learning this stuff, and don't want to screw up too bad
-
You should 301 redirect the old URL's to the new URL's and setup a disallow for search results in your robots.txt file.
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
-
Site dropped in search for 95% after 18-19 feb
Hi people. I have a client which holds a escort agency website operating in Amsterdam the Netherlands. Please take note that Escort Agency is legal and holland is a liberal country with permit and all, so just trying to point out that it's a perfectly legal crafted business. To the point: we are seeing a 95% drop in traffic (basicly back to barely 10 clicks a day) after 18 to 19 feb. We've inspected the incoming links, and we did see some things going on that where not quite healthy. At first a banner was bought on a dutch advertising website. On their behalf, this sitewide banner got published with a follow on roughly 132k of pages. That was strike 1 (i think). After tossing this in disavow for temporarily basis and informed the advertisal website to put any sitewide link to nofollow in the first place, nothing changed. We found a 2nd site doing the same mistake. Frankly the banner got exposed on roughly 100k of pages on which some of 'm where barely 2 days old. Strike 2. Solved this by putting it in disavow for the time being and asking politely to put the banner again, nofollow. We cleaned out any incoming potential spammy links by using disavow. The data we obtained was a mix of google webmaster itself and moz profiling. However we're one month further now, and the graph is still a big phat flatline. What is going on? I've noted that, one other sites, which share the same brand, but completely different websites / subnets / content and all, has the same threatment going on showing a huge drop from 18th of feb 2019 and is unable to recover. We cannot see anything 'bad' actually going on @ webmasters and there is no manual action taken. So we're kind of stuck now on a site that was my project but now completely fell into oblivion and hurting someone's business. The url is https://www.qualityescort.nl/ - anyone has a reasonable advice to this issue? full.jpg full.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jvanderlinde0 -
How to Get Rid of Dates Shown In Google Search Results
When I enter "Site: URL" to check what a search how Google displays search result, a date appears at the very front. This takes away several characters, really valuable real estate. How can I stop Google from displaying these dates? There are certain Wordpress plugins like "WP Date Remover" however the seem to only apply to blog posts. Dates are appearing on results on all my Wordpress pages. Is there an internal setting in Wordpress that will allow me to remove dates for these non blogpost pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
How long after https migration that google shows in search console new sitemap being indexed?
We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed? Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap?
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap. Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.0 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Why is Google Displaying this image in the search results?
Hi i'm looking at advice on how to remove or change a particular image Google is displaying in the search results. I have attached a screenshot. From the first look of it, i assumed the image would be related and be on the dealers Google+ Local Page: https://plus.google.com/118099386834104087122/about?hl=en But there are no photos. The image seems to be coming from the website. Is there a way to stop Google from displaying this image or making them display a totally different image. Thanks, Chris XzfsnUy.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mattcarter080 -
How would I be able to make sure Google lists search results as a combined listing opposed to a single listing/
I am slightly confused about how to let Google know to index our site as a complex listing opposed to individual page listing. Our site is well established and has over 3500 indexes. Does this have to do with the Sitemap or is it something else? Is there a way to expedite Google to list our site like the example below. Thank you for your help! Whole Foods Market
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | olive13<cite>www.wholefoodsmarket.com/</cite>Owns and operates chain of natural foods supermarkets which sell meat and poultry free of growth hormones and antibiotics, unprocessed grains and cereals, ... | ### Stores
Hours: Open 8am to 10pm Seven Days a Week. Note Holiday ... | ### Online Ordering
welcome find a store healthy eating about our products ... |
| ### CouponsHere they are: printable coupons from the latest issue of our in ... | ### Recipes
This boldly flavored casserole is an excellent way to use leftover ... |
| ### CareersHiring Process - Job Fairs and Events - Career Paths - ... | ### Lamar
Located just blocks from where Whole Foods Market began as ... |
| More results from wholefoodsmarket.com » |0 -
My site is duplicated on the internet, please help.
I've been told that my site: "- your site is duplicated on the internet. Both www.joeyvalyphotography.com and joeyvalyphotography.com are valid internet addresses. This is a problem for SEO." I am wondering, what's the cause of this, and how it can fixed. Thanks In advanced, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaji0 -
Steps you can take to ensure your content is indexed and registered to your site before a scraper gets to it?
Hi, A clients site has significant amounts of original content that has blatantly been copied and pasted in various other competitor and article sites. I'm working with the client to rejig lots of this content and to publish new content. What steps would you recommend to undertake when the new, updated site is launched to ensure Google clearly attributes the content to the clients site first? One thing I will be doing is submitting a new xml + html sitemap. Thankyou
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qasim_IMG0