404'd pages still in index
-
I recently launched a site and shortly after performed a URL rewrite (not the greatest idea, i know). The developer 404'd the old pages instead of a permanent 301 redirect. This caused a mess in the index. I have tried to use Google's removal tool to remove these URL's from the index. These pages were being removed but now I am finding them in the index as just URL's to the 404'd page (i.e. no title tag or meta description). Should I wait this out or now go back and 301 redirect the old URL's (that are 404'd now) to the new URL's? I am sure this is the reason for my lack of ranking as the rest of my site is pretty well optimized and I have some quality links.
-
Will do. Thanks for the help.
-
I think the latter - robot and 301.
but (if you can) leave a couple without 301 and see what (if any) difference you get - would love to hear how it works out.
-
Is it better to remove the robots.txt entries that are specific to the old URL's so Google can see the 404 so Google will remove those pages at their own pace or remove those bits of the robots.txt file specific to the old URL's and 301 them to the new URL's. It seems those are my two options....? Obviously, I want to do what is best for the site's rankings and will see the fastest turnaround. Thanks for your help on this by the way!
-
I'm not saying remove the whole robots.txt file - just the bits relating to the old urls (if you have entries in a robots.txt that affect the old urls).
e.g. say you're robots.txt blocks access to
then you should remove that line from the robots.txt otherwise google won't be able to crawl those pages to 'see' the 404 and realise that they're not there.
My guess is a few weeks before it all settles down, but that really is a finger in the air guess. I went through a similar scenario with moving urls and then moving them again shortly after the first move - took a month or two.
-
I am a little confused regarding removal of the robots.txt file since that is a step in requesting removal from google (per their removal tool requirements). My natural tendency is to 301 redirect the old URL's to the new ones. Will I need to remove the robots.txt file prior to permanently redirecting the old URL's to the new ones? How long does it take Google (estimate) to remove old URL's after a 301?
-
Ok, got that, so that sounds like an external rewrite - which is fine. url only, but no title or description - that sounds like what you get when you block crawling via robots.txt - if you've got that situation, I'd suggest removing the block so that google can crawl them and find that they are 404s. Sounds like they'll fall out of the index eventually. Another thing you could try to hurry things along is: 301 the old urls to the new ones. submit a sitemap containing the old urls (so that they get crawled and the 301s are picked up) update your sitemap and resubmit with only the new urls.
-
When I say URL rewrite, I mean we restructured the URL's to be cleaner and more search friendly. For example, take a URL that was www.example.com/index/home/keyword and structure it to be www.example.com/keyword. Also, the old URL's (i.e. www.example.com/index/home/keyword) are being shows towards the end of the site:example.com search with just the old URL - no title or meta description. Is this a sign that they are on the way out of the index? Any insight would be helpful.
-
Couple of things probably need clarifying: When you say URL rewrite, I'm assuming you mean an external rewrite (in effect, a redirect)? If you do an internal rewrite, that (of itself) should make no difference at all to how any external visitors/engines see your urls/pages. If the old pages had links or traffic I would be inclined to 301 them to the new pages. If the old pages didn't have traffic/links, leave them, they'll fall out eventually - they're not in an xml sitemap by any chance are they (in which case update the sitemap). You often see a drop in rankings when restructuring a site and (in my experience), it can take a few weeks to recover. To give you an example, it took nearly two months for the non-www version of our site to disappear from the index after a similar move (and messing about with redirects).
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
-
Why is a canonicalized URL still in index?
Hi Mozers, We recently canonicalized a few thousand URLs but when I search for these pages using the site: operator I can see that they are all still in Google's index. Why is that? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be taken out of the index? Or should we only expect that they won't rank as high as the canonical URLs? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Do internal links from non-indexed pages matter?
Hi everybody! Here's my question. After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages. Would be great to hear your thoughts! Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Client has moved to secured https webpages but non secured http pages are still being indexed in Google. Is this an issue
We are currently working with a client that relaunched their website two months ago to have hypertext transfer protocol secure pages (https) across their entire site architecture. The problem is that their non secure (http) pages are still accessible and being indexed in Google. Here are our concerns: 1. Are co-existing non secure and secure webpages (http and https) considered duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications
2. If these pages are duplicate content should we use 301 redirects or rel canonicals?
3. If we go with rel canonicals, is it okay for a non secure page to have rel canonical to the secure version? Thanks for the advice.0 -
Does D’Italia matter in links when it should be d'Italia?
Hello, I notice some of the back-link anchor text uses html code for a ' The business name is: d'Italia But it shows as: D’Italia. Does Google decipher it as d'Italia?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infinart0 -
Why Is Google Indexing These Product Pages On Shopify?
How can we communicate to Google the exact product pages we'd like indexed on our site? We're an apparel company that uses Shopify as our ecommerce platform. Website is sportiqe.com. Currently, Google is indexing all types of different pages on our site. **Example of a product page we want indexed: ** Product Page: sportiqe.com/products/PRODUCT-TITLE (Like This) **Examples of product pages being indexed: ** sportiqe.myshopify.com/products/PRODUCT-TITLE sportiqe.com/collections/COLLECTION-NAME/products/PRODUCT-TITLE See attached for an example of how two different "Boston Celtics Grateful Dead" shirts are being indexed. Any suggestions? We've used both Shopify and Google Webmaster tools to set our preferred domain (sportiqe.com). We've also added this snippet of code to our site three months ago thinking that would do the trick... {% if template == 'product' %}{% if collection %} {% endif %}{% endif %} sKwNZOl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0 -
Why are so many pages indexed?
We recently launched a new website and it doesn't consist of that many pages. When you do a "site:" search on Google, it shows 1,950 results. Obviously we don't want this to be happening. I have a feeling it's effecting our rankings. Is this just a straight up robots.txt problem? We addressed that a while ago and the number of results aren't going down. It's very possible that we still have it implemented incorrectly. What are we doing wrong and how do we start getting pages "un-indexed"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0