How to Remove Old Comment Page Query String URLs
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
Removing indexed pages
Hi all, this is my first post so be kind 🙂 - I have a one page Wordpress site that has the Yoast plugin installed. Unfortunately, when I first submitted the site's XML sitemap to the Google Search Console, I didn't check the Yoast settings and it submitted some example files from a theme demo I was using. These got indexed, which is a pain, so now I am trying to remove them. Originally I did a bunch of 301's but that didn't remove them from (at least not after about a month) - so now I have set up 410's - These also seem to not be working and I am wondering if it is because I re-submitted the sitemap with only the index page on it (as it is just a single page site) could that have now stopped Google indexing the original pages to actually see the 410's?
Technical SEO | | Jettynz
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.0 -
URL / sitemap structure for support pages
I am creating a site that has four categories housed in folders off of the TLD. Example: example.com/category-1
Technical SEO | | InterCall
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-3
example.com/category-4 Those category folders contain sub-folders that house the products inside each category. Example: example.com/category-1/product-1
example.com/category-2/product-1
etc. Each of the products have a corresponding support page with technical information, FAQs, etc. I have three options as to how to structure the support pages' URLs. Option 1 - Add new sub-folder with "support" added to string: example.com/category-1/product-1-support Option 2 - Add a second sub-folder off of the product sub-folder for support: example.com/category-1/product-1/support Option 3 - Create a "support" folder with product sub-folders: example.com/support/product-1 Which of these three options would you choose? I don't like having one large /support folder that houses all products. It seems like this would create a strange crawling and UX situation. The sitemap would have a huge /support folder with all of my products in it and the keywords in my category folders would be replaced with the word "support." Because I would rather have the main product pages ranking over any of the support pages (outside of searches containing the word "support"), I am leaning toward Option 2: example.com/category-1/product-1/support. I think this structure indicates to crawlers that the more important page is the product page, while the support page is secondary to that. It also makes it clear to users that this is the support page for that particular product. Does anyone have any experience or perspective on this? I'm open to suggestions and if I'm overthinking it, tell me that too. Thanks, team.0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
How to verify a page-by-page level 301 redirect was done correctly?
Hello, I told some tech guys to do a page-by-page relevant 301 redirect (as talked about in Matt Cutts video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) when a company wanted to move to a new domain when their site was getting redesigned. I found out they did a 302 redirect on accident and had to fix that, so now I don't trust they did the page-by-page relevant redirect. I have a feeling they just redirected all of the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new domain. How could I confirm this suspicion? I run the old domain through screaming frog and it only shows 1 URL - the homepage. Does that mean they took all of the pages on the old domain offline? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Updating content on URL or new URL
High Mozzers, We are an event organisation. Every year we produce like 350 events. All the events are on our website. A lot of these events are held every year. So i have an URL like www.domainname.nl/eventname So what would you do. This URL has some inbound links, some social mentions and so on. SO if the event will be held again in 2013. Would it be better to update the content on this URL or create a new one. I would keep this URL and update it because of the linkvalue and it is allready indexed and ranking for the desired keyword for that event. Cheers, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6
Technical SEO | | malady0