Still seeing older links

[TrueluxGroup]

We have recently updated all our product page titles on our website to something more descriptive for our Google Shopping campaign. This was what was recommended we do by the folks at Google. Doing this causes all of the URLs for the products to reflect this change. The structure is as such: https://ourwebsite.com/bulbs/product_id/title. Now when Moz provides us with our weekly crawl report we see a load of duplicate page content errors (roughly the same amount as the number of product pages). I don't quite see this as a coincidence so it must be a consequence of having updated the titles.

My question is why is Moz still crawling our older links? We no longer link to any of the pages with the older URLs so why are they conflicting?

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! To answer your question directly, Moz would be crawling your old URLs because it is able to find them using internal links and/or your sitemap.

You can verify that Moz is crawling your old URLs --  and even see where they are finding them -- using Moz Analytics. To do this, log into into your Moz Analytics dashboard and go to the Crawl Diagnostics report, located under Search in the LH nav. The Crawl Diagnostics report will list the URLs of pages Moz has identified as duplicate content on the High Priorities tab, and how many internal and external links each of those pages has. To see the URL Moz crawled to find a specific page listed here,  download the CSV file from this tab and look at the column labeled "Referrer".

Please let me know if this answers your question or not, thanks!

Christy

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Check your internal links and sitemap - you may still have old URLs lingering there.

I would also make sure that you are redirecting those old URLs properly to their new URL destination. You should do a backlink audit as well and see if there any valuable links to update so the URL reflects this new structure and you get all the equity you can.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[DSM_UK]

Hi there,

Are the old URL's still accessible? 
If you change a URL it is always best to redirect the old URL to the new to avoid duplicate content.

Kind Regards

Jimmy