How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
-
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact).
These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages.
Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages.
What are my next steps?
-
All my clients are impatient with Google's crawl. I think the speed of life on the web has spoiled them. Assuming your site isn't a huge e-commerce or subject-matter site...you will get crawled but not right away. Smaller, newer sites take time.
Take any concern and put it towards link building to the new site so Google's crawlers find it faster (via their seed list). Get it up on DMOZ, get that Twitter account going, post videos to Youtube, etc. Get some juicy high-PR inbound links and that could help speed up the indexing. Good luck!
-
Like Mike said above, there still isn't enough info provided for us to give you a very clear response, but I think he is right to point out that you shouldnt really care about the extinct pages in Google's index. They should, at some point, expire.
You can specify particular URLs to remove in GWT, or your robots.txt file, but that doesn't seem the best option for you. My recommendation is to just prepare the new site in the new location, upload a good clean sitemap.xml to GWT, and let them adjust. If you have much of the same content as well, Google will know due to the page creation date which is the newer and more appropriate site. Hate to say "trust the engines" but in this case, you should.
You may also consider a rel="author" tag in your new site to help Google prioritize the new site. But really the best thing is a new site on a new domain, a nice sitemap.xml, and patience.
-
To further clear things up...
I can 301 every page from the old .php site to our new homepage (However, I'm concerned about Google's impression of our overall user experience).
Or
I can 410 every page from the old .php site (Wouldn't this tell Google to stop trying to crawl these pages? Although these pages technically still exist, they just have a different URL and directory structure. Too many to set up individual 301's tho).
Or
I can do nothing and wait for these pages to drop off of Google's radar
What is the best option?
-
After reading the further responses here I'm wondering something...
You switched to a new site, can't 301 the old pages, and have no control over the old domain... So why are you worried about pages 404ing on an unused site you don't control anymore?
Maybe I'm missing something here or not reading it right. Who does control the old domain then? Is the old domain just completely gone? Because if so, why would it matter that Google is crawling non-existent pages on a dead site and returning 404s and 500s? Why would that necessarily affect the new site?
Or is it the same site but you switched to Java from PHP? If so, wouldn't your CMS have a way of redirecting the old pages that are technically still part of your site to the newer relevant pages on the site?
I feel like I'm missing pertinent info that might make this easier to digest and offer up help.
-
Sean,
Many thanks for your response. We have submitted a new, fresh site map to Google, but it seems like it's taking them forever to digest the changes.
We've been keeping track of rankings, and they've been going down, but there are so many changes going on at once with the new site, it's hard to tell what is the primary factor for the decline.
Is there a way to send Google all of the pages that don't exist and tell them to stop looking for them?
Thanks again for your help!
-
You would need access to the domain to set up the 301. If you no longer can edit files on the old domain, then your best bet is to update Webmaster Tools with the new site info and a sitemap.xml and wait for their caches to expire and update.
Somebody can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but getting so many 404s and 500's already has probably impacted your rankings so significantly, that you may be best served to approach the whole effort as a new site. Again, without more data, I'm left making educated guesses here. And if you aren't tracking your rankings (as you asked how much it is impacting...you should be able to see), then I would let go of the old site completely and build search traffic fresh on the new domain. You'd probably generate better results in the long term by jettisoning a defunct site with so many errors.
I confess, without being able to dig into the site analytics and traffic data, I can't give direct tactical advice. However, the above is what I would certainly do. Resubmitting a fresh sitemap.xml to GWT and deleting all the info to the old site in there is probably your best option. I defer to anyone with better advice. What a tough position you are in!
-
Thanks all for the feedback.
We no longer have access to the old domain. How do we institute a 301 if we can no longer access the page?
We have over 200,000 pages throwing 404's and over 70,000 pages throwing 500 errors.
This probably doesn't look good to Google. How much is this impacting our rankings?
-
Like others have said, a 301 redirect and updating Webmaster Tools should be most of what you need to do. You didn't say if you still have access to the old domain (where the pages are still being crawled) or if you get a 404, 503, or some other error when navigating to those pages. What are you seeing or can you provide a sample URL? That may help eliminate some possibilities.
-
You should implement 301 redirects from your old pages to their new locations. It's sounds like you have a fairly large site, which means Google has tons of your old pages in its index that it is going to continue to crawl for some time. It's probably not going to impact you negatively, but if you want to get rid of the errors sooner I would throw in some 301s. \
With the 301s you'll also get any link value that the old pages may be getting from external links (I know you said there are none, but with 200K+ pages it's likely that at least one of the pages is being linked to from somewhere).
-
Have you submitted a new sitemap to Webmaster Tools? Also, you could consider 301 redirecting the pages to relevant new pages to capitalize on any link equity or ranking power they may have had before. Otherwise Google should eventually stop crawling them because they are 404. I've had a touch of success getting them to stop crawling quicker (or at least it seems quicker) by changing some 404s to 410s.
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
-
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
How Google sees my page
When looking for crawlability issues, what is the difference between using webmaster tools Fetch as google, looking at the cached pages in google index site:mypage.com, or using spider simulator tools.
Technical SEO | | shashivzw0 -
How to inform Google to remove 404 Pages of my website?
Hi, I want to remove more than 6,000 pages of my website because of bad keywords, I am going to drop all these pages and making them ‘404’ I want to know how can I inform google that these pages does not exists so please don’t send me traffic from those bad keywords? Also want to know can I use disavow tool of google website to exclude these 6,000 pages of my own website?
Technical SEO | | renukishor4 -
How to block text on a page to be indexed?
I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca
Technical SEO | | CharmingGuy0 -
Should i index or noindex a contact page
Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website
Technical SEO | | aronwp0 -
Google is ranking the wrong page
We are trying to figure out why google is ranking the wrong page for the key word motorcycle tires. We have a few ideas but are not sure yet. If you do a search for Motorcycle Tires you will see site on page 2 or top of 3; however, the page will be going to our dirt bike tires page (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/44/86/176/742/Dirt-Bike-Tires-All) not our Motorcycle page (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/750/Motorcycle-Tires-All) any thoughts? We think we know why but want others opinions too.
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
How do I keep Google from crawling my PPC landing page?
Question, I don't want Google to catch my PPC landing pages, but I'm wondering if I make the page no-follow, no-index will it still crawl my landing page for quality score? Just to clarify I do want it to crawl the landing page to boost my quality score on PPC, but I do not want it to index it for SEO. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Blank pages in Google's webcache
Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | A_Q
Elias0