Worth it to redirect .swf during a website migration?
-
Recently one of our clients switched web providers. We've been implementing 301 redirects to the new URL structure for the most important pages.
We noticed upon doing a site search, Google has indexed a .swf URL on page 3 of search results. Please see attached image.
1. Should I implement a redirect for this? There are no links to this filetype.
2. There are three others (.swf) that are indexedI would think the best thing to do is to have the new website return a 404 for this page, as it's currently doing, and it will eventually drop out of the index.
Any other suggestions?
Thanks!
-
Thanks Andy! I'll add the second step of the URL removal tool.
-
Hi,
It will eventually drop out if it is returning a 404 or you could always use the page removal tool in Webmaster Tools?
-Andy
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
-
Website removed from Bing and Yahoo
Hello, Our website howtoremove.guide was recently removed from the Bing and Yahoo index. The first thing we did was contact Bing Webmaster support to ask what the issue was since we did not get any notifications or messages in our webmaster dashboard. The email that we got back said “I have escalated the issue to our engineers and will get back to you once I receive an update.” Since then, we haven't received any word back from them, but we did not find any technical problems and we strongly believe we were manually penalized. We've never had issues with a search engine before, so we are at a loss what to do. Could you please give us advice as to what technical issue our website might have or what could incur a deindex penalty in our case? We want to do everything that is possible to get back into Bing and Yahoo search results ASAP. The website has primarily affiliate content, so we are doing anything we can to clean everything up, but any recommendations will be incredibly useful to us. We are also open to contacting an expert on this, but we have no idea where to look.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThreatAnalyzer0 -
Any Tips for Reviving Old Websites?
Hi, I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory? Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for. The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CopBlaster.com1 -
Training Website Improvements...
Hi Folks, I'm in the process of going over our corporate website with a view to improving on-page optimisation, layout, design and user experience and I would like your feedback on what you think I should improve or change with respect to SEO. Some of my ideas include: Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low) Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation) Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation) Improve & Streamline the Booking Process AJAXIFY the Booking Process Improve Responsive Elements I'm also interested in conducting user testing before I go ahead and make any changes. What are your thoughts? What would you change? Thanks. Gaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Moving to https: Double Redirects
We're migrating our site to https and I have the following question: We have some old url's that we are 301ing to new ones. If we switch over to https then we will be forced to do a double-redirect for these url's. Will this have a negative SEO impact? If so, is there anything that we can do about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Construction website
Hi, I have a construction website that is aimed at tradesmen. There are 2 goals of the site: 1. To allow potential customers to sign up for a trade account. 2. To allow existing customers to access to products and login to their account to make an order. The site is full of categories and products which should be indexed so we rank for these trade products. The homepage redesign is where i am having an issue: Currently the site is set up like a standard retail site but without prices, which are viewable only when logged in. The homepage is designed such that there is several call to actions about promotions, services and to apply for a trade account, that apply to both existing and potential customers. At the moment there is a poor conversion to get potential customers to apply for a trade account. This is because there is too much distraction away from this goal and they are allowed to engage other areas of the site freely. The main purpose of the homepage should be to encourage potential customers to sign up. The secondary purpose to for existing customers to access the accounts and products. I believe potential customers should not be exposed to the categories and products as it is a distraction from the primary goal. Potential customers, i.e. Tradesmen, would already have a certain understanding of the types of products we provide, so I don't feel it is necessary to allow them to crawl the rest of the site unless they have an account. What are your thoughts on that? Here is my lack of understanding: On the homepage, if I restrict access to categories and products to existing account holders only, where a login is required to proceed, would that mean Google cannot access these pages to index them? Or is this only controlled by NoFollows & Robots.txt? Obviously not indexing is undesirable. I do understand potential customers will need some information about our range of products but the idea is to coerce them to sign up for an account so they can see this information. The more information that is provided to a potential customer, the higher the probability a person can make a decision against applying for an account. Restricting access creates a motivator to reveal information and we capture their data to converse with them personally. This increases the probability of us being able to retain their interest by providing a customised service based on their needs. All of this I feel makes perfect sense to me, the only query/obstacle I have is the indexing of the site. If Google cannot index pages that are restricted by account access, then I would like suggestions to solve/compromise/optimise the above. Just to address the desired behaviour of index pages. If in search a our product page appears, the person clicking the link would either be redirected or exposed to a login or sign up screen to view. Thank you so much for your help. Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AVSFencingSupplies0 -
How worth it is it to pursue websites who steal your content via cease/desist or DMCA takedown?
We publish popular general interest content. Using a commercial scanning service, we've found our copied content in many places. Is there an SEO value in getting copied content removed from websites who infringe / copy our content? It is a time consuming process and many infringements. And.... what if they copy the content, but include original links to our site in the content. Ironically, this is actually generating links for us - does this affect the answer?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sftravel0 -
Duplicate titles but redirecting anyway (without redirects set up!!!)
Google has done a crawl of my site and is flagging up duplicate titles on my wordpress site. This appears to be due to the face that some posts are tagged in more than one category. I have just gone to make sure that each post just has one category and add redirects and I've noticed that all the duplicate title issues google has notified me about appear to redirect anyway. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy have duplicate titles apparantly but the 1st url redirects to the 2nd one. I use the redirection plug in but have no redirection set up for that url so I'm a bit confused. And if they're redirecting anyway then why is google flagging up duplicate titles? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1