SERPs showing hundreds of nonexistent pages

[webdesyaug17]

My site has this page (URL) that actually exists on my site https://mysite.com/ranking/rankings-of-nike-running-shoes

but somehow I can see the following versions in SERPs (these URLs are not physically available on my site):

https://mysite.com/ranking/rankings-of-rankings-of-rankings-of-nike-running-shoes
https://mysite.com/ranking/rankings-of-rankings-of-nike-running-shoes

I even started getting traffic from these URLs that are in Google's index.

So, only the first one actually existins on my site:

1. https://mysite.com/ranking/rankings-of-nike-running-shoes
2. https://mysite.com/ranking**/rankings-of-rankings-of-**rankings-of-nike-running-shoes
3. https://mysite.com/ranking/**rankings-of-**rankings-of-nike-running-shoes

Questions are:
a. I'm not sure how the latter two - 2) and 3) - got in Google's index.
b. what do I do with them. My idea is to 301 redirect them to the actual page that exists https://mysite.com/ranking/rankings-of-nike-running-shoes

Do I need to also somehow remove the faulty URLs - 2) and 3) - from Google's index or 301 redirecting is enough?

[guidetoiceland]

301 redirects should do the trick but you need to figure out how this happened to begin with and make sure to squash the bug to fix the issue.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

1. I would check the internal links on your website to see if you accidentally typed the URL wrong. Then, I would check your backlinks (using Open Site Explorer, Majestic, or Ahrefs) to see if any websites are linking to your website with the incorrect URL (then ask them to update the link!)

2. Simply redirect them to the URL you want to be the ranking URL, update your sitemap, and submit that sitemap to Google Search Console.

Hope this helps! Good luck!
Patrick