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
-
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
My video sitemap is not being index by Google
Dear friends, I have a videos portal. I created a video sitemap.xml and submit in to GWT but after 20 days it has not been indexed. I have verified in bing webmaster as well. All videos are dynamically being fetched from server. My all static pages have been indexed but not videos. Please help me where am I doing the mistake. There are no separate pages for single videos. All the content is dynamically coming from server. Please help me. your answers will be more appreciated................. Thanks
Technical SEO | | docbeans0 -
Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects
Does the sandbox still exist? What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.
Technical SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
301 redirect from Blogger
Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
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 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0