Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. 301s being indexed

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    301s being indexed

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    6
    1289
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • IrvCo_Interactive
      IrvCo_Interactive Subscriber last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • anthonydnelson
        anthonydnelson last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • KristinaKledzik
          KristinaKledzik last edited by

          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
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • IrvCo_Interactive
            IrvCo_Interactive Subscriber last edited by

            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).

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • trung.ngo
              trung.ngo last edited by

              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

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • eyepaq
                eyepaq last edited by

                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 !

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Ben-R

                  E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed

                  Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
                  User-agent: *
                  Disallow: /admin
                  Disallow: /cart
                  Disallow: /orders
                  Disallow: /checkout
                  Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
                  Disallow: /carts
                  Disallow: /account
                  Disallow: /collections/+
                  Disallow: /collections/%2B
                  Disallow: /collections/%2b
                  Disallow: /blogs/+
                  Disallow: /blogs/%2B
                  Disallow: /blogs/%2b
                  Disallow: /design_theme_id
                  Disallow: /preview_theme_id
                  Disallow: /preview_script_id
                  Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
                  Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
                  0
                • odihost

                  Google does not want to index my page

                  I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost
                  0
                • Ullamalm

                  Wrong URLs indexed, Failing To Rank Anywhere

                  I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank. It was published in Nov/Dec last  year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.) I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned. Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL! I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up…. Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do? I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty 😕

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm
                  0
                • ioannisa

                  Mass Removal Request from Google Index

                  Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website.  When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts.  This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012.  So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
                  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove.  Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404?  I believe this is very wrong.  As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
                  https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
                  http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
                  0
                • walletapp

                  My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages

                  Hi there MOZ community.  I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps.  Oddly only the categories rank.  The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand.  Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp
                  0
                • JohnW-UK

                  Best way to block a sub-domain from being indexed

                  Hello, The search engines have indexed a sub-domain I did not want indexed its on old.domain.com and dev.domain.com - I was going to password them but is there a best practice way to block them. My main domain default robots.txt says :- Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml global User-agent: *
                  Disallow: /cgi-bin/
                  Disallow: /wp-admin/
                  Disallow: /wp-includes/
                  Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
                  Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
                  Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
                  Disallow: /trackback/
                  Disallow: /feed/
                  Disallow: /comments/
                  Disallow: /category//
                  Disallow: */trackback/
                  Disallow: */feed/
                  Disallow: /comments/
                  Disallow: /?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK
                  0
                • Lakshdeep

                  XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index

                  We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lakshdeep
                  0
                • PaulRogers

                  Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?

                  I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.