How to Remove Old Comment Page Query String URLs
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I used to use a comments program on my website that created comment pages in the form of http://www.example.com/web-page.htm?comm_page=2. When I switched to a new comments program, I worried that these old comment URLs would be considered duplicate content. I created a 301 redirect that, for example, would redirect http://www.example.com/web-page.htm?comm_page=2 to http://www.example.com/web-page.htm and disallowed them in robots.txt, which I later learned was not the thing to do.. I have removed the URLs from being disallowed in robots.txt. However, many months later, these comment page URLs keep appearing in Google's index from time to time. I use the "Remove URLs" tool in Google Webmaster Tools to remove the URLs from Google's index, but more URLs appear a few days later. How can I get rid of these URLs for good?
Thanks!
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If you have still left the redirects in place; these should work. As they would indicate that the 'old' page redirects to the page without comments. I would also suggest adding a canonical link to all your pages. So in case you missed a redirect or you have disabled them it would tell Google that the page it is visiting is exactly the same as the one in the canonical link.
Change will not happen overnight; it will take some time; especially if you had a robots blocking Google from doing to that url, as it would have to first identify the url to be 'crawlable' then find the redirect or canonical, after that update the serps & indexes.
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