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.
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
-
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page.
Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed?
Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
-
Hi,
I would like to know have you updated your sitemap? If not Kindly update it on the website as well as add the sitemap in Google Webmaster tool.
You can block old urls which you do not want to get indexed.
Yes it will affect the traffic as there are two different pages of same services which will distributes the customers.
-
Thanks Eric, we did this all on the same domain, migrated from something that uses ".asp" to Wordpress. It has been about 18 months, hopefully you are right and this is not affecting rankings.
-
Patrick, thanks for the response, there is only one redirect, from the old page to the new one (this was all done on the same domain) I will check the sitemap.
-
Whenever you migrate a domain name to another domain name (I think this is what you're saying you did), Google will keep the URLs of the old domain name in their index for at least a year. That's if you migrate to a new domain name.
If the pages have 301 redirects to other pages on the site or new pages on the site, then those old URLs could still remain in the index for a period of time--you'll be able to see them if you search for the URL.
Typically even if those URLs are still indexed, it shouldn't be hurting rankings at all.
-
Hi there
If there is more than 1 redirect, I would look into cutting that down as much as possible to 1. Google and other search engines will only follow redirects to a certain point, and if it follows more than 2 or 3, you could be in trouble. So make sure redirects are 1 to 1.
Beyond that, I focus on the following:
- Review Google's resource on properly moving a site
- Update your internal links to reflect new URL structure
- Update your sitemap and submit to Google / Bing
Let me know if this helps answer your question or if you've completed this already! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
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 | | walletapp0 -
How to handle individual page redirects on Wix?
I switched from one domain to another because I wanted a domain that had our company name so it was more brand-y. However, the old domain had better DA/PA. Originally I set up a global 301 from the old to the new, but now I'm finding that I actually need to set up individual 301's from each URL of the old site, or at least from each page. However, I am using Wix so it looks like I can't always do URL-URL 301's, although I can redirect any URL to a page on the new website. The problem is that, in some cases, the content on the new site is different (or, for example, I can only link a particular blog post on the old site back to the new site's blog's main page). How closely do URLS/pages need to resemble each other for link juice to be transferred? Also, should I try to set up all these redirects manually or bite the bullet and go back to using the old domain? The problem is that I did a lot of beginner SEO junk for the new domain, like submitting to a few higher-quality directories, and getting our website on various industry resource sites, etc. I'd need to re-do this entirely if I go back to the old page. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BohmKalish1230 -
How can I prevent duplicate pages being indexed because of load balancer (hosting)?
The site that I am optimising has a problem with duplicate pages being indexed as a result of the load balancer (which is required and set up by the hosting company). The load balancer passes the site through to 2 different URLs: www.domain.com www2.domain.com Some how, Google have indexed 2 of the same URLs (which I was obviously hoping they wouldn't) - the first on www and the second on www2. The hosting is a mirror image of each other (www and www2), meaning I can't upload a robots.txt to the root of www2.domain.com disallowing all. Also, I can't add a canonical script into the website header of www2.domain.com pointing the individual URLs through to www.domain.com etc. Any suggestions as to how I can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic. Example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk Regards Mark0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0