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
-
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
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:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
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,0 -
How to check if the page is indexable for SEs?
Hi, I'm building the extension for Chrome, which should show me the status of the indexability of the page I'm on. So, I need to know all the methods to check if the page has the potential to be crawled and indexed by a Search Engines. I've come up with a few methods: Check the URL in robots.txt file (if it's not disallowed) Check page metas (if there are not noindex meta) Check if page is the same for unregistered users (for those pages only available for registered users of the site) Are there any more methods to check if a particular page is indexable (or not closed for indexation) by Search Engines? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boostaman0 -
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 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Links from non-indexed pages
Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxweb0 -
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 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0