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In this case site B is not a new site. I am not moving all traffic to site B only a portion which included duplicate urls that were software generated between domains.

I am in the process of trying to get google to follow a large number of old links on site A to site B. Currently I have 301 redirects as well a cross domain canonical tags in place.

My issue is that Google is not following the links from site A to site B since the links no longer exist in site A.  I went ahead and added the old links from site A into site A's sitemap.

Unfortunately Google is returning this message inside webmaster tools:

When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL.

However I do not understand how adding the redirected links from site B  to the sitemap in site A  will remove the old links. Obviously Google can see the 301 redirect and the canonical tag but this isn't defined in the sitemap as a direct correlation between site A and B.

Am I missing something here?

I went ahead and added the links to the sitemap, however when google crawled the links I receieve this message.

When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL.

However I do not understand how adding the redirected links to the sitemap will remove the old links.

One of the previous developers left a hole that caused this issue. The system shares code between sites.

Andrew,

The links were removed from the offending sites, but If I understand the gist of your suggestion Google won't remove them as quickly if they are no longer linked and  yes I am using canonical tags.   So I should  create a sitemap with the previous links and once Google follows these links to the main site remove the sitemap.  Is that your recommendation?

I suppose I can try this first before filing a request to remove the entire site.

I am referring to an e-commerce site, so yes its dynamic. The hole has been plugged (so to speak) but the content still exists in the google cache.

Steve, Maybe I haven't explained the issue in enough detail. The duplicate content issue is  related to a technical issue with the site causing the content to be duplicated when it should not have been.  Its not a matter of rewriting content.  My issue deals with purging this content from these other domains so that the main domain  can be indexed with this content.

I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain.

My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages.

I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the  cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older.  Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen?

Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site.

I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages.

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

TraxNYC I don't think you understand my question. I am not referring to the number of links on page, I am referring to the number of links directed at a specific page.

I have read all the data regarding the number of links per page, but my question has to do with the number of  internal links to a particular page.

After looking at some of the competition inside Open Site Explorer I can see that the competitor in question  has a much smaller number of links going to the desired page then the site I am comparing. The competitor is outranking a page  that should be ranking higher due to higher page authority and external root domain links.

Internal Links to Page: 9,950

Competitor Page  Internal LInks: 208

Is this a situation where the sheer number of internal links is discounted because of page rank distribution throughout the site?

Just want to get some clarity here. Thank you for your responses.

Yes, I think you are right. I don't believe Google would apply any relevance to the links if they are changing on each page load. The end result may be that the links would generate the appearance of cloaked links.

If its a dynamic site you are better of creating slightly differerent anchor tags and write some code to display each set based on page type. That way there is some method to the madness.