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.
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
-
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to.
Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s.
We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain.
We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input.
- Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.
- Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.
- Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.
Thank you.
Rosemary
One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
-
You're right - I'm worrying about something that isn't yet a problem.
Thank you
-
In my experience, the best way to absolutely get rid of them is to use the 410 permanently gone status code, then resubmit them for indexation (possibly via an XML sitemap submission, and you can also use Google's crawl testing tool in Search Console to double-check). That said, even with 410, Google can take their time.
The other option is to recreate 200 pages there and use the meta robots noindex tag on the page to specifically exclude them. The temporary block in Google Search Console can work, too, but, it's temporary and I can't say whether it will actually extend the time that the redirected pages appear in the index via the site: command.
All that said, if the pages only show via a site: command, there's almost no chance anyone will see them
-
Ok, Rand - one last questions.
I do think one year is a long time to have old results and if I was going to do a test to get Google to stop showing them in their SERPs what would you do? --- Let's say a client asked you to have these URLs disappear
The 79 pages that appear in the /eichler/ directory are from a personal site so I don't care what happens with those pages in the SERPs.
My ideas are:
-
Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.
-
Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.
-
Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.
-
Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.
-
Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.
-
Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.
-
-
14 months! Wow. That is a long time indeed. Although, now that I look, Moz redirected OpenSiteExplorer just about a year ago, and we still have URLs showing for the site: command in Google too (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aopensiteexplorer.org) so I suppose it's not that uncommon.
Glad to hear traffic and rankings are solid. Let us know if we can help out in the future!
-
Thank you Rand. It has been 14 months since these pages were moved and I'd never seen Google retain pages anywhere near this long.
You're right of course, there has been no impact to traffic for our site as these pages weren't about our search business.
Thanks for taking a look at our issue.
Rosemary
-
Oh gosh - it's my pleasure! Thanks for being part of the Moz community
I'm honored to help out.As for the URLs - looks like everything's fine. Google often maintains old URLs in a searchable index form long after they've been 301'd, but for every query I tried, they're clearly pulling up the correct/new version of the page, so those redirects seem to be working just great. You're simply seeing the vestigal remnants of them still in Google (which isn't unusual - we had URLs from seomoz.org findable via site: queries for many months after moving to Moz, but the right, new pages were all ranking for normal queries and traffic wasn't being hurt).
Some examples:
- https://www.google.com/search?q=Enter+the+World+of+Eichler+Design
- https://www.google.com/search?q=Eichler+History+flashbacks
- https://www.google.com/search?q=eichler+resources+on+the+web+books
Unless you're also seeing a loss in search traffic/rankings, I wouldn't sweat it much. They'll disappear eventually from the site: query, too. It just takes a while.
-
Wow - do I ever feel privileged to have you respond! Thank you Rand.
You can see a batch of redirected URLs here < site:totheweb.com eichler >
I appreciate any suggestions.
Rosemary
-
Hi Rosemary - can you share some examples of the URLs and the queries that bring them up in search results? If so, we can likely do a diagnosis of what might be going on with Google and why the pages aren't correctly showing the redirected-to URLs.
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
-
Unpublish and republish old articles
This might be a dumb question but we had an incident where a new SEO guy thought it would be a good idea to un-publish and republish all of your 200+ blog posts which we carefully scheduled over the last 6 months. He did not update the content and did not change anything. His intention was to send out google a sign to recheck the sites or something. Now, the entire blog looks like it wen't live in one day, which I don't think is good? Should we load a backup and get our old publishing dates back, should we keep it with the new publishing dates? What are the consequences? Will it effect our SEO?
Technical SEO | | Funlocity1 -
Some Old date showing in SERP
I see some old date Jan 21 2013 showing up for some categories in Google search results. These are category pages and I do not see the date in view source. This is not a wordpress site or a blog page. We keep changing this page by removing/adding items so it is not outdated.
Technical SEO | | rbai0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Special characters in URL
Will registered trademark symbol within a URL be bad? I know some special characters are unsafe (#, >, etc.) but can not find anything that mentions registered trademark. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Cyrillic letter in URL - Encoding
Hi all We are launching our site in Russia. As far as I can see by searching Google all sites have URLs in latin letters. Is there a special reason for this? - It seems that cyrillic letters also work. My technical staff says that it might give some encoding problems. Can anyone give me some insight into this? Thanks in advance.. / Kenneth
Technical SEO | | Kennethskonto0 -
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
Technical SEO | | jkundrotas0