Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
-
Howdy,
I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it.
We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.)
We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC.
Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated.
BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps.
Thanks, Kirk
-
No worries, let us know if it changes anything.
-
Thanks for the tip Martijn,
I will give it a try and let you know how it goes.
(By the way, sorry for the slow response. I did not get a notification that I had any)
Kirk
-
Thanks EGOL, that seems to be exactly what is happening to us!
-
For the past year, Google is having a very hard time forgetting pages. You can use a 301 redirect, take the files off of the server, and Google will still list the old URL - but click to the 301 destination.
-
Hi Kirk,
Try pinging the URLs of these old pages to Google (http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=URL/of/file), if you have a list of the pages on the old site that's something that I would try. What could be causing this is that these old pages were barely visited by the crawlers and because of that they're not being picked up yet as being redirected. Basically, by pinging them to Google (a bit of an oldskool technique) you can trigger a crawl of them and hopefully, this will help.
Martijn.
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
-
Issue with site not being properly found in Google
We have a website [domain name removed] that is not being properly found in Google. When we run it through Screaming Frog, it indicates that there is a problem with the robot.txt file. However, I am unsure exactly what this problem is, and why this site is no longer properly being found. Any help here on how to resolve this would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo1 -
Why this site is not hit by google penguin only experts answer please
Hello I know a site which has the following things and it is not hit by google penguin at all and is ranked on first page first link in google.com.pk it has 1.3K total backlinks its has 34 referring domains according to ahrefs the exact match keyword which is ranked in google.com.pk as first position is used in 1.2 K backlinks its DA is 18 and PA is 31 its citation flow is 19 trust flow is 13 targeted exact match keyword is present in Title and description also. Now tell me what is happening here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tanveerayakhan0 -
Site not indexed in Google UK
This site was moved to a new host by the client a month back and is still not indexed in Google UK if you search for the site directly. www.loftconversionswestsussex.com Webmaster tools shows that 55 pages have been crawled and no errors have been detected. The client also tried the "Fetch as Google Bot" tactic in GWT as well as running a PPC campaign and the site is still not appearing in Google. Any thoughts please? Cheers, SEO5..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
How to identify 404 that get links from external sites (but not search engines)?
one of our site had a poor site architecture causing now about 10.000s of 404 being currently reported in google webmaster tools. Any idea about easily detecting among these thousands of 404, which ones are coming from links from external websites (so filtering out 404 caused by links from our own domain and 404 from search engines)? crawl bandwidth seems to be an issue on this domain. Anything that can be done to accelerate google removing these 404 pages from their index? Due to number of 404 manual submission in google wbt one by one is not an option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Or do you believe that google automatically will stop crawling these 404 pages within a month or so and no action needs to be taken? thanks0 -
Author Tag - How do you get your Author Thumbnail on more then one site?
Ive managed to set up the Rel:Author tag on my wordpress site, and the thumbnail is now showing in Google search results Each article I write on my blog has a link to me Author page, which has on it a link to my Google Plus page. So this works great. However I write articles for another few websites and would like to get my author thumbnail image showing for them articles too. How do I do this? Do I need an Author page on the other sites also? I dont think I'll be able to get an author page on the other sites, is it not possible to somehow link direct from the article to my G+ page? How would guest articles work too? Any ideas? Thanks in advance guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Relaunching old site - Will it regain former link equity?
We've got an older site with significant link equity. It 301 redirects to our current website, passing all traffic, link value, etc. The 301 redirects have been in place for several years. Since the original redirects were setup, the current website has acquired massive link equity above and beyond the redirects. I am considering removing all the 301 redirects and bringing the old site back to life (same URLs, content, design as before). I would also keep the current website live as is. The goal is to capture more SERP visibility by having 2 website "brands" in the same market. Will the old site regain it's former link equity or will we effectively be starting from scratch? In other words, does Google consider how long 301 redirects have been in place?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeff_DomainTools0 -
Getting Google to index MORE per day than it does, not with greater frequency nec.
Hi The Googlebot seems to come around healthily, every day we see new pages that we've written the week before get ranked, however, if we are adding 12-15 new products/blog entries/content bits each day, only about 2-3 ever get indexed per day and so, after a few weeks, this builds up to quite a time lag. Is there any way to help step up the amount of new pages that get indexed every day? It really will take 2 or 3 each day, but no more than that, it seems strange. We're fairly new, around 6 months creating content but domain name 18 months old. Will this simply improve over time, or can something be done to help google index those pages? We dont mind if the 15 we do on Monday all get indexed the following Monday for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
How to get my blog listed as United states based in google search?
I am from India.I find that when i search here on google.com or google.co.in some of the blogs operated by Indians are listed as United states next to search results.How is it possible and how can i do it for my blog? Help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivmagnuvi0