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.
Proper 301 in Place but Old Site Still Indexed In Google
-
So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today.
The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?
-
How big is the site in question? How many pages are there to de-index?
What does Google Webmaster Tools tell you about the old domain? Does it show pages being removed from the index over time?
If you do a site:{old domain} query, can you see that the number of results being returned is gradually decreasing?
How have you implemented the redirects?
Have you submitted a change of address request in Webmaster Tools?
On the new website, have you submitted a sitemap fom the old website as well as the new one?
What does the backlink profile on the old domain look like? Can you start to get authoritative links to the old site updated? What about any embedded internal links in your content - have they also been updated?
More guidance from Google here:
-
It could just be me kchandler, but I've seen it take as long as 8 months for old pages to get purged from Google's index, redirected or not. The redirect and indexing are independent of one another.
-
Kyle -
Sorry this is so puzzling. The only other thing I could think of is that perhaps the older pages still somehow exist and/or are being served by the server? For example, the .htaccess file might have the /old-page.php redirecting to the /new-page.php... but somehow the old-page.php is still accessible? I'd also look at caching, too? For example, our site, www.CustomerParadigm.com uses varnish for caching, so if we make a change to the site, we need to clear out that page or the change won't be reflected publicly.
Hope this helps?
-- Jeff
-
Hi Jeff, thank you for the quick response, it is truly appreciated
Unfortunately i am not able to publicly release their URL in forums due to part of our contract. However i can provide some feedback to your ideas.
- Different web servers - the website is the same and on the same hosting platform, they just updated their branding and along with that their domain name
- WWW. vs non-WWW. - I did a quick check and it looks like both versions of the old domain properly 301 redirect no matter what the subdomain. I am checking that both with my Chrome developer tools as well s checkmyheaders.com.
- Robots.txt on old server - as it related to my first bullet, it is technically the same website and server the the robots.txt is the same for the new website just reflecting the new domain.
Are there any other things that i could look at for a sanity check? I have never seen a website not get de-indexed after a 301 redirect. Do you think i would need to submit something to Google Webmaster Tools for the old URLs/domains?
Regards, Kyle
-
Without seeing the new and old sites, my first impression is that this might have been caused by having the older site on a different server; the newer site might be on a newer, different Web server. If this is the case, and the older server is still online, I'd check your DNS zone files to make sure that the older site isn't somehow still accessible? I've seen cases where there's two A records for the www. version of a domain; not ideal, but it can cause issues. I'd also set the robot.txt file on the older server / older site to no-index / no-follow.
Hope this helps?
Thanks,
- Jeff
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
-
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Does Google Index URLs that are always 302 redirected
Hello community Due to the architecture of our site, we have a bunch of URLs that are 302 redirected to the same URL plus a query string appended to it. For example: www.example.com/hello.html is 302 redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc The www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc page also has a link canonical tag to www.example.com/hello.html In the above example, can www.example.com/hello.html every be Indexed, by google as I assume the googlebot will always be redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc and will never see www.example.com/hello.html ? Thanks in advance for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommRulz0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
I have a .com site but I am only ranking good on google for Canada and not the USA.
We are located in Canada but sell our products world wide. We are ranking ok on google.ca but are not in the top 50 on google.com. Is it due to my ip address? Is there any tips that you can give me to help up my rating for google.com. Any info you can provide me with will be amazing. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewzal0