301 Question - issue
-
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me.
If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site.
We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page.
Why hasn't these pages been removed?
-
It's probably just taking Google a while to process all the changes. Really your 301s should point to the same content, not just all go to the homepage. If you had pages showing on two sites, the pages do 'really' exist on one site but weren't supposed to exist on the other. Correct the 301s so that they point from the URLs on the affected site, to the exact same pieces of content on the site where they were originally located (where they were supposed to be located)
If that fails use the HTTP header and X-robots (not no-index tags, fire the no-index directive from the HTTP header instead of the HTML) to tell Google not to index those URLs on the 'affected' website. In conjunction with that, alter the status code of all bogus URLs on the 'affected' site to 410, which is stronger than 404 (it means: GONE - not coming back, 404 just means temporarily gone but will return...)
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
-
Have issues about expired domain? How to work on it? How to redirect?
Using expired domains to redirect on your site? For this you need to first Active your expired domainsand put two to three articles After google will got it that its now active and so google start crawling after that you need to put same articles that you created on expired site on your new site with same urls Now make a wild card redirect to exact urls or posts you created on your site
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LyleTLai0 -
SEO Menu Question
I have a question regarding to the SEO benefits of different types of menus. Recently, I have noticed an increasing number of websites with the sort of menu like at www.sportsdirect.com, where there is only one main dropdown and then everything is a sub-menu of the sub-menus if that makes sense. Is this approach more, less or equal beneficial to what you see at http://www.wiggle.co.uk/ where there are multiple initial dropdown menus? Appreciate the feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
301 vs 302
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s? Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec0 -
301 redirect via htaccess question
So, I have www.sitea.com and www.siteb.com I want to redirect SOME pages from www.sitea.com to www.siteb.com (example: www.sitea.com/plugins/wp/ to www.siteb/wp/ etc ) and the rest of any pages left, to the homepage of www.siteb.com. It is something with conditions... any help, please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasmin280 -
Issues with Sub domains for dealers
I'm starting a new SEO project and am feeling a little overwhelmed due to the scale of it. I am not sure where to start and hope that someone has some ideas. Thousands of dealer websites reside as sub domains on gravelymower.com/ (e.g. http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/) The particular sub domain mentioned above is not showing up at all for any searches and is not cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/ I realize that pretty much zero SEO best practices are followed on page and the location is not on the page, but why is this sub domain not even being indexed by Google? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BridgelineDigital880 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
Large Site SEO - Dev Issue Forcing URL Change - 301, 302, Block, What To Do?
Hola, Thanks in advance for reading and trying to help me out. A client of mine recently created a large scale company directory (500k+ pages) in Drupal v6 while the "marketing" type pages of their site was still in manual hard-coded HTML. They redesigned their "marketing" pages, but used Drual v7. They're now experiencing server conflicts with both instances of Drupal not allowing them to communicate/be on the same server. Eventually the directory will be upgraded to Drupal v7, but could take weeks to months the client does not want to wait for the re-launch. The client wants to push the new marketing site live, but also does not want to ruin the overall SEO value of the directory and have a few options, but I'm looking to help guide them down the path of least resistance: Option 1: Move the company directory onto a subdomain and the "marketing site" on the www. subdomain. Client gets to push their redesign live, but large scale 301s to the directory cause major issues in terms of shaking up the structure of the site causing ripple effects into getting pulled out of the index for days to weeks. Rankings and traffic drop, subdomain authority gets lost and the company directory health looks bad for weeks to months. However, 301 maintains partial SEO value and some long tail traffic still exists. Once the directory gets moved to Drupal v7, the directory will then cancel the 301 to the subdomain and revert back to original www. subdomain URLs Option 2: Block the company directory from search engines with robots.txt and meta instructions, essentially cutting off the floodgates from the established marketing pages. No major scaling 301 ripple effect, directory takes a few weeks to filter out of the index, traffic is completely lost, however once drupal v7 gets upgraded and the directory is then re-opened, directory will then slowly gain back SEO value to get close to old rankings, traffic, etc. Option 3: 302 redirect? Lose all accumulate SEO value temporarily... hmm Option 4: Something else? As you can see, this is not an ideal situation. However, a decision has to be made and I'm looking to chose the lesser of evils. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again -Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bacon0 -
Archive or no archive?... That is the question!
When running a classified site, what is best practice for what to do with expired ads? Should they stay on the site with a sold stamp perhaps? Or should they be moved to an archive subdomain, with the original URL 301 redirecting to the new archive ad? I'm kinda thinking the second option but I suppose the only issue with this is you would have to have a consistent flow of new ads on the site to prevent categories from getting too thin. Thoughts on this and any other/better solutions would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0