301s being indexed

[IrvCo_Interactive]

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?

[anthonydnelson]

Hi,

This is completely normal at the moment. Many 301 URLs stay in the index for 6-12 months.

Case in point, google this:

site:seomoz.org

There isn't anything you can do. Verify your 301s are set-up correctly. Move on.

[KristinaKledzik]

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

[IrvCo_Interactive]

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).

[trung.ngo]

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

[eyepaq]

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 !