Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites

[cuarto715]

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!

[Keszi]

Let me know how it turns out. If the problem persist, I'm glad to help good luck!

[cuarto715]

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!

[Keszi]

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.