How to Get Google to Recognize Your Pages Are Gone
-
Here's a quick background of the site and issue. A site lost half of its traffic over 18 months ago and its believed to be a Panda penalty. Many, many items were already taken care of and crossed off the list, but here's something that was recently brought up.
There are 30,000 pages indexed in Google,but there are about 12,000 active products. Many of these pages in their index are out of stock items. A site visitor cannot find them by browsing the site unless he/she had bookmarked and item before, was given the link by a friend, read about it, etc. If they get to an old product because they had a link to it, they will see an out of stock graphic and not allow to make the purchase.
So, efforts have been made about 1 month ago to 301 old products to something similar, if possible, or 410 them. Google has not been removing them from the index. My question is how to make sure Google sees that these pages are no longer there and remove from the index? Some of the items have links to them and this will help Google see them, but what about the items which have 0 external / internal links?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
In working on a site which has about 10,000 items available for sale. Looking in G
-
Sure, I can see the issues there. Having a look at the sitemap and submitting that would be my best guess.
-
No problem with stating the obvious...A fetch within GWT was done, but they would start from the homepage and work their way down from what I understand. How would they crawl these 'dead' pages which have been 301'd and 410'd?
-
Hi again
Okay - thanks for the clarification.
Now, I have never used this tool, but you could try the Remove Outdated Content tool from Google in Webmaster Tools. The reason I put that disclaimer here is because I don't know the timeline in how long it takes the content to get removed and I want you to make sure that this is a step you want to take, especially for thousands of pages.
Otherwise, you best bet is to just hang tight, rerun your sitemap, reupload to WMT, and let the crawls take their course. This may be the best bet. Good luck!
-
Hi Patrick,
The sitemap only shows the active products; therefore, the older, out of stock items, are not in there (definitely a good thing to check).
If you try to go to one of these pages, the header does show a 301 or 410, respectively. But, does Google recrawl all of the pages in their index? How will they see that these are gone if there are no links to many of these pages?
All product descriptions are unique, but unfortunately, a large site scraped them for a few years and recently stopped. That's another big piece to the puzzle as Google gave them credit when in fact, it was coped from the penalized site.
-
I am just stating the obvious, but have you used Google Webmaster Tools and prompted for a reindexation? Do you want to give a visitor a custom 404 or a an image of the sold out product, with newer and on stock alternatives?
That could be an elegant solution, though it could be a technical challenge.
-
Hi there
Did you make sure to remove those pages from your sitemap.xml? It takes Google a minute sometimes to see that pages are gone. I still have issues with that as well, but it's just the name of the game.
I would also check your internal links to make sure all links that point to those pages are pointing to their new locations. I would also check your backlink profile to see if any good links are out there that point to those old pages. Reach out and have those corrected.
Also check the product descriptions on those new pages to make sure they are robust and unique to the product.
Hope this helps - let me know if you have any more questions.
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
-
Too many SEO changes needed on a page. Create a new page?
I've been doing some research on a keyword with Page Optimization. I'm finding there's a lot of changes suggested. I'm wondering that because of the amount of changes required is it better to create a new page entirely from scratch that has all the suggestions implemented OR change the current page? Thanks, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris29181 -
301 Redirect to Home Page or Sub-Page?
What do you think about 301 redirect of good expired domain to a sub-page instead of the home page? I'm doing this so I don't hurt my brand name. Let me know your thoughts please. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuanWork0 -
Moz page optimization score issue, have a score of 95, but can get to 99 if I ad my keyword basically twice in the url.
Hello, I have a keyword for lack of providing too much info we will say my keyword is laptop-bags. Now we have a /laptop-bags/ page and inside that page **/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder/ ** We got a score of 95 for that page. Now I got a score of 99 when I changed it to **/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ ** The way Bigcommerce handles is it will use the product category title in the url, page title and site links, to me it feels like it's spammy, as well as on my /laptop-bags/ page, I now have 18 keywords of " laptop bags " on that page when before it was 12, since I added laptop-bags to all 6 categories inside the laptop-bags page. How would you handle this, use the /keyword/ then /longtail-keyword/ in full or would using /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ still rank for leather shoulder laptop bags? I've asked this before and was told to use whatever sounded better to the user, but now moz is telling me different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
How to get a site out of Google's Sandbox
Hi I am working on a website that is ranking well in bing for the domain name / exact url search but appears no where in Google or Yahoo. I have done the site search in Google and it is indexed so I am presuming it is in the sandbox. The website was originally developed in India and I do not know whether it had some history of bad backlinks. The website itself is well optimised and I have checked all pages in Moz - getting a grade A. Webmaster Tools is not showing any manual actions - I was wondering what I could do next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Our website scores A but on google we are still on 7th page
Hi all, I have run on page keyword optimizations with exact terminology used to find our company service or our competition on google. We have ranked A, with almost all points complete. I did the same for our main competitor and they ranked F. Then i did page positioning on Google and they get on page 1 fifth line and we get page 7. We have plenty of unique content and extensive website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EMGCSR
Could there be any other reason than reason for this other than backlinks? Many thanks for your help.0 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0