I physically changed my URL and now I have two...How do I get rid of the old one?
-
Hi, I physically changed my URL as something else and now Google thinks I have two duplicate pages (I know not to do this in the future).
e.g. I had www.example.com/i-like-seo.aspx
and changed it to:
www.example.com/i-love-seo.aspx
Google sees this as two pages now and my CMS system is only showing one page (The new page) Also, SEOMOZ is seeing two pages and further more sees them both as having two different amounts of inbound links?
When I change content on the new url page, the old url page also updates. I'm really confused as to what has happened here and don't know how to get rid of the old url so that Google doesn't think that I have duplicate content.
Any help to what has happened or how to fix it would be so helpful and appreciated.
Many thanks.
-
Looking at the footer of your website, I see "Powered by Communications3000
C3MS
"
From a quick look of the site it links to I'm guessing it's something your webdevelopers have put together rather then an 'Off The shelf" cms so to speak.
I would recomend you find an SEO who knows both SEO and some .Net who could communicate with you and your developers to see if it is indeed impossable to do a 301, or if your developers are making excuses/misunderstanding the request/e.t.c.
That would probably give a better understanding of the situation.
As everyone else has said it /does/ sound rather odd that a 301 can't be implimented between the various ways of doing it.
-
.NET is not a CMS system. It is a language your CMS is written in. (As in you can have the same menu in english and also in french, you could in theory have the same CMS in .php and .NET).
You'd need to give the name of the CMS if you want advice on it's suitability.
Honestly, your developer should be able to 301 from URL a to b without loops based on the info provided so far.
-
Weird, sounds like it. Ask them if they delete the page completely in the CMS and create it again if there will only be one URL then?
You can block one of the URLs in your robots.txt file, since it's the same page and you can't add a noindex or canonical tag to one of them without it showing on the other too, and request URL removal in the Google WMT URL removal tool. But blocking in robots.txt alone doesn't guarantee it won't get indexed again.
The sites links should be updated to point to the new URL and not reference the old URL on the site or in any sitemap.xml files.
-
Hi Irving,
Many thanks for the advice. The thing that I'm most confused about is that my web developer (whom is third party) is telling me that this is the same page but two different URLs, Hence I can't add code or alter one as they are the same thing.
I looked into removing the cache in Google, but I can't do this as they ask you to type a word that is present in your new page but not in your old one, but obviously I cant do this as its "apparently" one page.
Do you think that there may be an issue with my web developers CMS system?
Again, many thanks
-
Hi Sean,
Am I right by thinking that it should then be possible for my web developer to redirect the old URL to the new one?
In your opinion is .NET an old CMS system? If so do you think it is worth updating?
Many thanks,
-
If the old page has no PR and no traffic just 404 it or noindex it and you can canonical it to the other page.
if the old page has PR and you cannot 301 for some weird reason, just rewrite the content on the new page to make it unique and keep both pages
-
whoops, I didn't spot that, I just saw the example and didnt read the finer details!
-
hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.
You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops.. (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).
At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary. You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.
-
The website is not on wordpress. In their example, the url ends with .aspx which is .NET not wordpress which is php.
To give you an example, we have a client on asp and we had the dev implement a url rewrite as the old urls were not pretty.
ex: www.example.com/categories.asp?id=12 was the old url so we have a field on the category backend called rewrite which we put in new-category and it not only is rewriting that category url to www.example.com/new-category.aspx but it also 301 redirects /categories.asp?id=12 to /new-category
Make sense?
-
Hi Jo,
Thanks for getting back to me. I'm not using word press, my company uses a third party web developer. I have already requested the web developer to do a 301 redirect and this is what they said:
"Solving the problems by 301 permanent re directs are out of the question as this would create infinite loops. Likely to bring down our server."
What do you think to this reply from my web developer? I personally have never heard anything like this before.
Yes, we are based in Huddersfield. I guess that makes us neighbors
Again, many thanks for your advice.
Tom
-
Hi
Technically there are two pages - the old one and the new one. That's the way Google will see it. You need to point the old page at the new page with a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.
Are you using wordpress? You can get an easy plugin called 'redirection'
Here are the SEOMoz best practises around redirecting.
By the way, are you in Hudds? I'm just over the hill in Elland!
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
-
I'm struggling to understand (and fix) why I'm getting a 404 error. The URL includes this "%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D" but I cannot find that anywhere in the referring URL. Does anyone know why please? Thanks
Can you help with how to fix this 404 error please? It appears that I have a redirect from one page to the other, although the referring page URL works, but it appears to be linking to another URL with this code at the end of the the URL - %5Bnull%20id=43484%5D that I'm struggling to find and fix. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
Some of my website urls are not getting indexed while checking (site: domain) in google
Some of my website urls are not getting indexed while checking (site: domain) in google
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Why are my changes not being updated?
Last week, I was notified of having a lot of duplicated title pages. I've recently made the changes on my website with unique content. I went back on MOZ this morning, and I'm still notified with the same problems. However, when I check the back end of that specific page, I see the changes already made. My question is, why are my changes not being updated in MOZ? Does it take awhile for MOZ to recognize this or am I missing a step?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Why are these two URLs showing in Moz as duplicate content?
Here is the first URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/FBPP0000012376.asp Here is the 2nd URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/flag-spreader.asp Granted I am new to this issue on this website, but what is Roger seeing that I'm not? A lot of our duplicate pages are just like this example.
Technical SEO | | Flaglady0 -
Changing a blog url from subdomain to subfolder
I am abou to change my company blog from a subdomain (blog.mydomain.com) to a subfolder (mydomain.com/blog), from suggestions from this awesome community! Not only that though, because the current blog is on another server than the main site I have to move my blog between servers as well. This will be a big hassle for me, and means a big risk for errors as I don't have a clue what I am doing on the development part. Hint: I'm no developer. My blog is fairly new, having posted 18 blog posts so far. There is no major linking to or from the blog as it has been basically no activity on the blog. It has been fairly good optimized for SEO, with custom plugin settings for Wordpress SEO plugin and similar. Also followed advice from Rand regarding wordpress SEO. So I guess my question is: Would it be a big loss for me to just start over with a new blog on the subfolder domain? And move content over from the old blog manually (and then deleting the old one). Or would It be plain stupid taking that route? Thankfull for all help I can get!
Technical SEO | | danielpett0 -
Changing all urls
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site". So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site. We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority. The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls? Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up. Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months. Any suggestions or tips welcome! Thanks DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Changing preferred domain
My company has an international website, and because of a technical issue visitors in one of our main countries cannot visits the "www" version of our site. Currently, the www version is our preferred domain - and the non www redirects to that page. To solve this problem, I was thinking of proposing the following and would greatly appreciate any feedback! (Note: If you answered my www vs. non www question, thanks - this is a follow up) 1. Set non www site as the preferred version 2. Redirect from www to non www 3. Contact our current links and ask them to change to without “www” 4. Change canonical URLs to without “www”
Technical SEO | | theLotter0