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.
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
-
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed.
Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
-
Redirected URLs are generally removed from the index pretty quickly. I just checked and the /solutions URL is not indexed in Google, so you don't need to take additional measures to have that removed.
A good practice is to have no redirects in your sitemap. When I run new sitemaps, I use Screaming Frog and the first thing I do is remove everything that isn't a 200 status code. Keeping a clean XML sitemap helps your crawl budget and gets bots to focus on the more important parts of your site rather than having them step through unnecessary steps.
-
Why do you have it set up that way to begin with? Could you put the content on the higher level page? Or is it meant to be an easy-to-remember "vanity" URL? In any case, yes, do not put a page with no content in your sitemap.
And to get it to stop showing up in search, you can add a canonical to the page, pointing to the deeper page with the actual content.
-
Hi Jeff,
Yes, you should remove the blank page from sitemap. This will not de-index the previuos indexed.
If there aren't lots of pages, after updating the sitemap and updating Search Console with that sitemap, send request to remove those from the index.
That can be done in the Search Console account too.Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Max Number of 301 Redirections?
Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0 -
Drupal URL Aliases vs 301 Redirects + Do URL Aliases create duplicates?
Hi all! I have just begun work on a Drupal site which heavily uses the URL Aliases feature. I fear that it is creating duplicate links. For example:: we have http://www.URL.com/index.php and http://www.URL.com/ In addition we are about to switch a lot of links and want to keep the search engine benefit. Am I right in thinking URL aliases change the URL, while leaving the old URL live and without creating search engine friendly redirects such as 301s? Thanks for any help! Christian
Technical SEO | | ChristianMKTG0 -
Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?
I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?
Technical SEO | | upick-1623910