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.
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
-
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect)
My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days.
Any ideas? Thanks!
-
Let me know how it turns out. If the problem persist, I'm glad to help
good luck! -
I just tried removing them manually from GWT, i'll wait until they pop back up again and i'll update the question with the urls, for now i'll mark it as answered, thanks for the help!
-
Hey,
Can you point out an example URL? (if you don't want to disclose the website URL in here, you can do it via a personal message). This way we can debug an exact URL and not just a theory.
Regarding blocking via robots.txt: it is never a good idea to block a search engine from URLs you want to deindex. This way the Google crawlers won't grab and process the data, and you will have your URLs in the search index.
Just check: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
"While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by
robots.txt, we might still find and index a disallowed URL if it is linked from other places on the web. As a result, the URL address and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the page can still appear in Google search results."In case of 301 redirects (make sure you are not using 302), if the crawler can access the page, you should have the old URL removed from the index.
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
-
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Should I redirect images when I migrate my site
We are about to migrate a large website with a fair few images (20,000). At the moment we include images in the sitemap.xml so they are indexed by Google and drive traffic (not sure how I can find out how much though). Current image slugs are like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia
http://website.com/assets/images/a2/65680/thumbnails/638x425-crop.jpg?1402460458 Like on the old site, images on the new website will also have unreadable cache slugs, like:
http://website.com/site_media/media/cache/ce/7a/ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg All content pages on the new site will have the same slugs as on the old site. Should I go through the trouble of redirecting all these images?0 -
For how long does Google honor a 302 redirect?
Greetings! I would love some recent experiences to support our experience which is +/- 1 year old on this question. Based on our experiences around a year ago, I believe that Google will only honor a 302 temporary redirect for a relatively short period - perhaps up to a month - and then it will begin treating the redirect as a 301 redirect and will remove the old page from the index. Have others seen this? Is there an update on what the max "safe" period to have a 302 in place could be? We have a domain that is soon to experience about 3 months of "downtime" with no content on it, but the content will be back after that time. Ideally we would 302 redirect the pages elsewhere just for that downtime period. However, I don't want to do a 302 redirect if there is a risk that the pages will lose all of their accumulated authority and indexing. Basically, is there any safe way to just put the domain on ice for a few months? Please share recent experience only. Thanks for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | g-s-m0 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
How do I go about changing a 302 redirect to a 301.
Hello Friends! Thanks for viewing my question. Ok,My question today is How do I go about redirecting a 302 link to a 301 link. I understand the benefits of doing this as far as link juice and how the Search Engines views the two Re-Directs. I am wanting to know where I would start to do this. Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0