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.
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
-
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?
I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Transfer link juice from old to new site
Hi seomozzers, The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept. My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on? Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Should you stop indexing of short lived pages?
In my site there will be a lot of pages that have a short life span of about a week as they are items on sale, should I nofollow the links meaning the site has a fwe hundred pages or allow indexing and have thousands but then have lots of links to pages that do not exist. I would of course if allowing indexing make sure the page links does not error and sends them to a similarly relevant page but which is best for me with the SEarch Engines? I would like to have the option of loads of links with pages of loads of content but not if it is detrimental Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barney30120