Getting rid of a site in Google
-
Hi,
I have two sites, lets call them site A and site B, both are sub domains of the same root domain. Because of a server config error, both got indexed by Google.
Google reports millions of inbound links from Site B to Site A
I want to get rid of Site B, because its duplicate content.
First I tried to remove the site from webmaster tools, and blocking all content in the robots.txt for site B, this removed all content from the search results, but the links from site B to site A still stayed in place, and increased (even after 2 months)
I also tried to change all the pages on Site B to 404 pages, but this did not work either
I then removed the blocks, cleaned up the robots.txt and changed the server config on Site B so that everything redirects (301) to a landing page for Site B. But still the links in Webmaster Tools to site A from Site B is on the increase.
What do you think is the best way to delete a site from google and to delete all the links it had to other sites so that there is NO history of this site? It seems that when you block it with robots.txt, the links and juice does not disappear, but only the blocked by robots.txt report on WMT increases
Any suggestions?
-
The sites are massive and we are talking massive numbers:
Google reports in WMT that site B still has 259,157,970 links to site A, although when you filter into the report it only shows a few
The current state is that nothing is blocked on Site B, and ALL pages point to the landing page of Site B.
In WMT for site B, G still shows data for all the reports, like search queries, keywords, crawl errors (very old and all fixed) and so on. The reports and data does not bother me as much as the 259,157,970 links it reports on Site A.
On the 11th of April when I started the process of getting rid of these links, there were 554,066,716, this jumped up to 603,404,378 on the 28th of April. It started dropping and was as low as 122,405,100 on the 17th of May, and then started growing again up to where it is now 259,157,970
I also noticed that when the pages was giving 404s that the crawl rate of google dropped to zero, now that its redirecting to the landing page, the crawl rate is back up to about 1,800 per day, which is still very low, considering the numbers we are talking about.
The crawl rate on Site A is okay, at 220,000 per day, but it was as high as 800,000 per day at one stage.
-
If you remove all history of a website it may still appear in the wayback machine.
If you first blocked robots then they wont create the 301 links, they'll just keep the previously cached pages? Maybe remove the robots.txt and let google index every page with the 301 to the landing page, then after they've indexed add the robot.txt back. Have you tried submitting a new sitemap in Webmaster tools pointing all pages at the landing page?
Roughly how many pages are in your website?
-
I failed to mention that both sites A and B had the exact same content, database and URL structure, with the only difference being the sub domain.
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
-
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
Google crawling 200 page site thousands of times/day. Why?
Hello all, I'm looking at something a bit wonky for one of the websites I manage. It's similar enough to other websites I manage (built on a template) that I'm surprised to see this issue occurring. The xml sitemap submitted shows Google there are 229 pages on the site. Starting in the beginning of December Google really ramped up their intensity in crawling the site. At its high point Google crawled 13,359 pages in a single day. I mentioned I manage other similar sites - this is a very unusual spike. There are no resources like infinite scroll that auto generates content and would cause Google some grief. So follow up questions to my "why?" is "how is this affecting my SEO efforts?" and "what do I do about it?". I've never encountered this before, but I think limiting my crawl budget would be treating the symptom instead of finding the cure. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks! *edited for grammar.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brettmandoes0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Site migration from non canonicalized site
Hi Mozzers - I'm working on a site migration from a non-canonicalized site - I am wondering about the best way to deal with that - should I ask them to canonicalize prior to migration? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Does Google only look at LSI per page or context of the Site?
From what I have read i should optimise each page for a keyword/phrase, however, I read recently that google may also look at the context of the site to see if there are other similar words. For example i have different pages optimised for Funeral Planning, funeral plans, funeral plan costs, compare funeral plans, why buy a funeral plan, paying for a funeral, prepaid funeral plans. Is this the best strategy when the words/phrases are so close or should i go for longer pages with the variations on one page or at least less pages? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
How to link my websites with each other - to avoid google penalities and get some value
I have good high DA PA websites hosted on same IP, added in same google analytics and GWT account. So i think google knows that owner is the same. How should we link them with each other to get some value? Put nofollow? With what anchor (Money keyword or domain name)? But whats the point? We cannot make natural link building profile with our own website nofollow links, i assume they will not count. What can you suggest? Maybe it is better not to link at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
How to see which site Google views as a scraper site?
If we have content on our site that is found on another site, what is the best way to know which site Google views as the original source? If you search for a line of the content such as "xyz abc etc" and the other site shows before yours in search results, does that mean that Google views that site as the original source?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0