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
-
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
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 -
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
Technical SEO | | Evo0 -
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 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0