Should I deindex my pages?
-
I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place.
Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.
-
Glad to hear it! Yeah, patience isn't easy, that's for sure.
-
Good the hear it went well.
Dr Peat,
Had some great advice.
glad to know it's working.
Thomas
-
Thanks for replying. As it happens, I checked wmt this morning and found that all of the old pages had been deindexed on their own (with the exception of 2 that had not been 301'd - they've been sorted now) and there are now no duplicate title warnings. The site is also looking better in SERPs.
You are right, I just needed to wait a few weeks and show some patience. Its quite easy to get impatient when justifying our cost to a client.
Thanks again.
-
Just checking in - has the situation improved in the month since you posted the question? I tend to agree with Thomas that it's usually just a waiting game, assuming the 301-redirects are working properly. It never hurts to use a header checker, just in case (it's amazing how often redirects get implemented poorly).
You could re-create the old sitemap if the transition is stalled. I'd avoid actively removing the old URLs, as that could interfere with making sure the link equity from the old URLs passes to the new ones. The only issue would be if you suspect duplicate content problems are harming you.
The devil is in the details on these situations, and it depends a lot on the size of the site, etc.
-
I do not know how big your old site was however if you have just done this you may see some overflow as the website cache has yet to die away on the old site.
You can always use the way back machine or archive.com/.org I know it's one of the two
after that follow the guide in Moz along with using a tool like screaming spider frog SEO the free version covers 500 pages for free however the Pro version is required to do redirects but makes it so easy it's well worth it.
That Way you can find your old site the way it was. And what the names of links Used to be. However if you have correctly 301 redirected the old links to the new site. Meaning equivalent pages then this should not be an issue. You have to allow Google time to index your website as well as the index for your old site. Get rid of I would use the tool in Google Webmaster tools and tell Google that you have moved your website this will allow it to be indexed or for quickly. However it may be complicated to have that happen without a new domain.
It does not sound like a crisis to me. However only you know how you conducted the 301 redirects.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Unexpected Rank Down After Page Update
Hello Team, I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP 😞 it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia
Technical SEO | | ManAPR0 -
Homepage is deindexed in Google
Happened sometime on the 12th or 13th of Feb (is there a way to tell exactly besides referring to GA?).
Technical SEO | | Shinosky
I've been on the Google Webmasters Tools forums trying to nail this down - https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/OgpmNCc3IFA/mmtgUilyXUUJ I can only think that Google is viewing this as duplicate content from an internal page for example: http://mudlifeled.com/shop Very frustrating because we were moving up on the first page for some good brand key words and traffic was climbing. Now I've got my hands up and am at a loss to what I can do.0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Redirecting over-optimised pages
Hi One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site. I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks. My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Pages not being found in serp
Hi I'm helping a collegue with his website. For what ever reason the pages in the Solutions Menu are not being found in the search result for keywords related to the pages. (Homepage mainly comes up in the search result). Does anyone have any advise to why this may be happening? *To give you a bit of a background understanding, previously all the menu content was copied (which I made him change), he also had hidden text on some pages (i made him remove, white text on white background) plus the url structure changed as well. Persoanlly I think he is over using , links, internal linking is not great & the general content is not great in the menu. Your Thoughts are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0