301s being indexed
-
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
-
Hi,
This is completely normal at the moment. Many 301 URLs stay in the index for 6-12 months.
Case in point, google this:
There isn't anything you can do. Verify your 301s are set-up correctly. Move on.
-
Hi there,
Have you run a crawl on your site to see if there are a lot of links pointing to the old URLs? If Google sees more links point to the old version of the URLs rather than the new version, it's possible that it thinks that the old pages aren't really gone for good.
- Kristina
-
Hi,
Thanks for your responses. There are no issues with robots or canonical tags that are apparent. The 301 redirects are accessible by Googlebot, I checked in Webmaster Tools. And the page that the 301 redirects to on the other domain has a canonical tag set to the proper URL (itself).
-
Hi IrvCo_Interactive,
I'd recommend digging in to the pages being 301 redirected to make sure there are no conflicting directives, e.g. a rel="canonical" tag pointing to another page on the old domain. I've seen this issue of conflicting directives affecting indexation before and wrote about it here: http://upstreamist.co/indexation-canonical-greater-than-301/
If there are no existing conflicting directives, it may be worth trying the canonical tag on top of the 301 redirect at least for a few pages to see if the canonical tag is more effective in removing the page from the index.
-Trung
-
If it's six months old - they yes - it might be a reason for concern as users might be set to the old domain. Can you check and see if you are blocking with robots.txt the old domain some how ? Since if that's the case the bot can't reach the old pages and see the redirection and if those pages are already in the index they will stay that way.
Alternatively check the logs and see if google bot did hit those pages in the last 6 mo - although I doubt it didn't - it's safe to check.
Cheers !
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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
In the google index but search redirects to homepage
Hi everyone, thanks for reading i have a website "www.gardeners.scot" and have the following pages listed in google site: command http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-landscaping-Edinburgh.htm & http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-maintenance-Edinburgh.htm however when a user searches for "garden landscaping Edinburgh" or "garden maintenance Edinburgh" we are in the rankings but google search links these phrases to the home page not to their targeted pages. the site is about a year old have checked the robots.txt, sitemap.xml & .htaccess files but can see anything wrong there. any ideas out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Weird Indexation Issue
On this webpage, we have an interactive graphic that allows users to click a navigational element and learn more about an anatomical part of the knee or a knee malady. For example, a user could click "Articular Cartilage" and they will land on this page: http://www.neocartimplant.com/knee-anatomy-maladies/anatomy/articular-cartilage The weird thing is whether you perform a Google Search for the above URL or for a string of text on that URL (i.e. "Articular cartilage is hyaline cartilage (as opposed to menisci, which consists of fibrocartilage) on the articular surfaces, or the ends, of bones. This thin, smooth tissue lines both joint surfaces where the bones come together to form the knee. ") the following page ranks: http://www.neocartimplant.com/anatmal/knee-anatomy-maladies/anatomy/articular-cartilage.php I have two questions: 1 - Any idea on how the Googlebot is getting to that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidangotti
2 - How should I get the Googlebot to index the correct page (http://www.neocartimplant.com/knee-anatomy-maladies/anatomy/articular-cartilage)? Thanks in advance for your help!0 -
Old pages STILL indexed...
Our new website has been live for around 3 months and the URL structure has completely changed. We weren't able to dynamically create 301 redirects for over 5,000 of our products because of how different the URL's were so we've been redirecting them as and when. 3 months on and we're still getting hundreds of 404 errors daily in our Webmaster Tools account. I've checked the server logs and it looks like Bing Bot still seems to want to crawl our old /product/ URL's. Also, if I perform a "site:example.co.uk/product" on Google or Bing - lots of results are still returned, indicating the both still haven't dropped them from their index. Should I ignore the 404 errors and continue to wait for them to drop off or should I just block /product/ in my robots.txt? After 3 months I'd have thought they'd have naturally dropped off by now! I'm half-debating this: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur
Disallow: /some-directory-for-all/* User-agent: Bingbot
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /product/ Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml0 -
Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi, I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice? Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too. Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Index process multi language website for different countries
We are in charge of a website with 7 languages for 16 countries. There are only slight content differences by countries (google.de | google.co.uk). The website is set-up with the correct language & country annotation e.g. de/DE/ | de/CH/ | en/GB/ | en/IE. All unwanted annotations are blocked by robots.txt. The «hreflang alternate» are also set. The objective is, to make the website visible in local search engines. Therefore we have submitted a overview sitemap connected with a sitemap per country. The sitemap has been submitted now for quite a while, but Google has indexed only 10 % of the content. We are looking for suggestion to boost the index process.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imsi0 -
Indexing Dynamic Pages
http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/search/Wiper+Blade/03300/C0047.oap?make=Honda&model=Accord&year=2005&vi=1430764 How is O'Reilly getting this page indexed? It shows up in organic results for [2005 honda accord windshield wiper size].
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Best way to stop pages being indexed and keeping PageRank
If for example on a discussion forum, what would be the best way to stop pages such as the posting page (where a user posts a topic or message) from being indexed AND not diluting PageRank too? If we added them to the Disallow on robots.txt, would pagerank still flow through the links to those blocked pages or would it stay concentrated on the linking page? Your ideas and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640