Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!

[kbates]

Howdy,

I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it.

We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.)

We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC.

Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated.

BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps.

Thanks, Kirk

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

No worries, let us know if it changes anything.

[kbates]

Thanks for the tip Martijn,

I will give it a try and let you know how it goes.

(By the way, sorry for the slow response. I did not get a notification that I had any)

Kirk

[kbates]

Thanks EGOL, that seems to be exactly what is happening to us!

[EGOL]

For the past year, Google is having a very hard time forgetting pages.   You can use a 301 redirect, take the files off of the server, and Google will still list the old URL -  but click to the 301 destination.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Kirk,

Try pinging the URLs of these old pages to Google (http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=URL/of/file), if you have a list of the pages on the old site that's something that I would try. What could be causing this is that these old pages were barely visited by the crawlers and because of that they're not being picked up yet as being redirected. Basically, by pinging them to Google (a bit of an oldskool technique) you can trigger a crawl of them and hopefully, this will help.

Martijn.