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.
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
-
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact).
These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages.
Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages.
What are my next steps?
-
All my clients are impatient with Google's crawl. I think the speed of life on the web has spoiled them. Assuming your site isn't a huge e-commerce or subject-matter site...you will get crawled but not right away. Smaller, newer sites take time.
Take any concern and put it towards link building to the new site so Google's crawlers find it faster (via their seed list). Get it up on DMOZ, get that Twitter account going, post videos to Youtube, etc. Get some juicy high-PR inbound links and that could help speed up the indexing. Good luck!
-
Like Mike said above, there still isn't enough info provided for us to give you a very clear response, but I think he is right to point out that you shouldnt really care about the extinct pages in Google's index. They should, at some point, expire.
You can specify particular URLs to remove in GWT, or your robots.txt file, but that doesn't seem the best option for you. My recommendation is to just prepare the new site in the new location, upload a good clean sitemap.xml to GWT, and let them adjust. If you have much of the same content as well, Google will know due to the page creation date which is the newer and more appropriate site. Hate to say "trust the engines" but in this case, you should.
You may also consider a rel="author" tag in your new site to help Google prioritize the new site. But really the best thing is a new site on a new domain, a nice sitemap.xml, and patience.
-
To further clear things up...
I can 301 every page from the old .php site to our new homepage (However, I'm concerned about Google's impression of our overall user experience).
Or
I can 410 every page from the old .php site (Wouldn't this tell Google to stop trying to crawl these pages? Although these pages technically still exist, they just have a different URL and directory structure. Too many to set up individual 301's tho).
Or
I can do nothing and wait for these pages to drop off of Google's radar
What is the best option?
-
After reading the further responses here I'm wondering something...
You switched to a new site, can't 301 the old pages, and have no control over the old domain... So why are you worried about pages 404ing on an unused site you don't control anymore?
Maybe I'm missing something here or not reading it right. Who does control the old domain then? Is the old domain just completely gone? Because if so, why would it matter that Google is crawling non-existent pages on a dead site and returning 404s and 500s? Why would that necessarily affect the new site?
Or is it the same site but you switched to Java from PHP? If so, wouldn't your CMS have a way of redirecting the old pages that are technically still part of your site to the newer relevant pages on the site?
I feel like I'm missing pertinent info that might make this easier to digest and offer up help.
-
Sean,
Many thanks for your response. We have submitted a new, fresh site map to Google, but it seems like it's taking them forever to digest the changes.
We've been keeping track of rankings, and they've been going down, but there are so many changes going on at once with the new site, it's hard to tell what is the primary factor for the decline.
Is there a way to send Google all of the pages that don't exist and tell them to stop looking for them?
Thanks again for your help!
-
You would need access to the domain to set up the 301. If you no longer can edit files on the old domain, then your best bet is to update Webmaster Tools with the new site info and a sitemap.xml and wait for their caches to expire and update.
Somebody can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but getting so many 404s and 500's already has probably impacted your rankings so significantly, that you may be best served to approach the whole effort as a new site. Again, without more data, I'm left making educated guesses here. And if you aren't tracking your rankings (as you asked how much it is impacting...you should be able to see), then I would let go of the old site completely and build search traffic fresh on the new domain. You'd probably generate better results in the long term by jettisoning a defunct site with so many errors.
I confess, without being able to dig into the site analytics and traffic data, I can't give direct tactical advice. However, the above is what I would certainly do. Resubmitting a fresh sitemap.xml to GWT and deleting all the info to the old site in there is probably your best option. I defer to anyone with better advice. What a tough position you are in!
-
Thanks all for the feedback.
We no longer have access to the old domain. How do we institute a 301 if we can no longer access the page?
We have over 200,000 pages throwing 404's and over 70,000 pages throwing 500 errors.
This probably doesn't look good to Google. How much is this impacting our rankings?
-
Like others have said, a 301 redirect and updating Webmaster Tools should be most of what you need to do. You didn't say if you still have access to the old domain (where the pages are still being crawled) or if you get a 404, 503, or some other error when navigating to those pages. What are you seeing or can you provide a sample URL? That may help eliminate some possibilities.
-
You should implement 301 redirects from your old pages to their new locations. It's sounds like you have a fairly large site, which means Google has tons of your old pages in its index that it is going to continue to crawl for some time. It's probably not going to impact you negatively, but if you want to get rid of the errors sooner I would throw in some 301s. \
With the 301s you'll also get any link value that the old pages may be getting from external links (I know you said there are none, but with 200K+ pages it's likely that at least one of the pages is being linked to from somewhere).
-
Have you submitted a new sitemap to Webmaster Tools? Also, you could consider 301 redirecting the pages to relevant new pages to capitalize on any link equity or ranking power they may have had before. Otherwise Google should eventually stop crawling them because they are 404. I've had a touch of success getting them to stop crawling quicker (or at least it seems quicker) by changing some 404s to 410s.
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
-
Does Page speed matter for google ranking?
We are not sure that page does matter or not for google ranking as I am working for this keyword "flower delivery in Bangalore" from last few months and I saw some website's google first page who have low page speed but still ranking so I am really worried about my page that has also low page speed. will my Bangalore page rank on google the first page if the speed is low and kindly suggest me more tips for the ranking best factors which really works in 2020 and one more thing that domain authority really matters in this year? as I also saw some websites with low domain authority and ranking on google's first page. Home page: Flowerportal Bangalore page: https://flowerportal.in/flower-delivery/bangalore/ focus Keyword is: Flower delivery in Bangalore, send flowers to Bangalore
Technical SEO | | vidi34231 -
Is there a way to get a list of all pages of your website that are indexed in Google?
I am trying to put together a comprehensive list of all pages that are indexed in Google and have differing opinions on how to do this.
Technical SEO | | SpodekandCo0 -
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
My video sitemap is not being index by Google
Dear friends, I have a videos portal. I created a video sitemap.xml and submit in to GWT but after 20 days it has not been indexed. I have verified in bing webmaster as well. All videos are dynamically being fetched from server. My all static pages have been indexed but not videos. Please help me where am I doing the mistake. There are no separate pages for single videos. All the content is dynamically coming from server. Please help me. your answers will be more appreciated................. Thanks
Technical SEO | | docbeans0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePunditCan you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0