I physically changed my URL and now I have two...How do I get rid of the old one?
-
Hi, I physically changed my URL as something else and now Google thinks I have two duplicate pages (I know not to do this in the future).
e.g. I had www.example.com/i-like-seo.aspx
and changed it to:
www.example.com/i-love-seo.aspx
Google sees this as two pages now and my CMS system is only showing one page (The new page) Also, SEOMOZ is seeing two pages and further more sees them both as having two different amounts of inbound links?
When I change content on the new url page, the old url page also updates. I'm really confused as to what has happened here and don't know how to get rid of the old url so that Google doesn't think that I have duplicate content.
Any help to what has happened or how to fix it would be so helpful and appreciated.
Many thanks.
-
Looking at the footer of your website, I see "Powered by Communications3000 C3MS"
From a quick look of the site it links to I'm guessing it's something your webdevelopers have put together rather then an 'Off The shelf" cms so to speak.
I would recomend you find an SEO who knows both SEO and some .Net who could communicate with you and your developers to see if it is indeed impossable to do a 301, or if your developers are making excuses/misunderstanding the request/e.t.c.
That would probably give a better understanding of the situation.
As everyone else has said it /does/ sound rather odd that a 301 can't be implimented between the various ways of doing it.
-
.NET is not a CMS system. It is a language your CMS is written in. (As in you can have the same menu in english and also in french, you could in theory have the same CMS in .php and .NET).
You'd need to give the name of the CMS if you want advice on it's suitability.
Honestly, your developer should be able to 301 from URL a to b without loops based on the info provided so far.
-
Weird, sounds like it. Ask them if they delete the page completely in the CMS and create it again if there will only be one URL then?
You can block one of the URLs in your robots.txt file, since it's the same page and you can't add a noindex or canonical tag to one of them without it showing on the other too, and request URL removal in the Google WMT URL removal tool. But blocking in robots.txt alone doesn't guarantee it won't get indexed again.
The sites links should be updated to point to the new URL and not reference the old URL on the site or in any sitemap.xml files.
-
Hi Irving,
Many thanks for the advice. The thing that I'm most confused about is that my web developer (whom is third party) is telling me that this is the same page but two different URLs, Hence I can't add code or alter one as they are the same thing.
I looked into removing the cache in Google, but I can't do this as they ask you to type a word that is present in your new page but not in your old one, but obviously I cant do this as its "apparently" one page.
Do you think that there may be an issue with my web developers CMS system?
Again, many thanks
-
Hi Sean,
Am I right by thinking that it should then be possible for my web developer to redirect the old URL to the new one?
In your opinion is .NET an old CMS system? If so do you think it is worth updating?
Many thanks,
-
If the old page has no PR and no traffic just 404 it or noindex it and you can canonical it to the other page.
if the old page has PR and you cannot 301 for some weird reason, just rewrite the content on the new page to make it unique and keep both pages
-
whoops, I didn't spot that, I just saw the example and didnt read the finer details!
-
hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.
You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops.. (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).
At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary. You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.
-
The website is not on wordpress. In their example, the url ends with .aspx which is .NET not wordpress which is php.
To give you an example, we have a client on asp and we had the dev implement a url rewrite as the old urls were not pretty.
ex: www.example.com/categories.asp?id=12 was the old url so we have a field on the category backend called rewrite which we put in new-category and it not only is rewriting that category url to www.example.com/new-category.aspx but it also 301 redirects /categories.asp?id=12 to /new-category
Make sense?
-
Hi Jo,
Thanks for getting back to me. I'm not using word press, my company uses a third party web developer. I have already requested the web developer to do a 301 redirect and this is what they said:
"Solving the problems by 301 permanent re directs are out of the question as this would create infinite loops. Likely to bring down our server."
What do you think to this reply from my web developer? I personally have never heard anything like this before.
Yes, we are based in Huddersfield. I guess that makes us neighbors
Again, many thanks for your advice.
Tom
-
Hi
Technically there are two pages - the old one and the new one. That's the way Google will see it. You need to point the old page at the new page with a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.
Are you using wordpress? You can get an easy plugin called 'redirection'
Here are the SEOMoz best practises around redirecting.
By the way, are you in Hudds? I'm just over the hill in Elland!
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
-
50 Duplicate URLS, but not the same
Hi According to my latest site crawl, many of my pages are showing up to 50 duplicate urls. However this isn't the case in real life. http://www.fortusgroup.com.au/browse-products/rubber-tracks/excavator-rubber-tracks/hitachi/ex-33mu.html is showing 31 duplicate URL. Examples include: http://www.fortusgroup.com.au/browse-products/rubber-tracks/excavator-rubber-tracks/parts/x430.html
Technical SEO | | JDadd
http://www.fortusgroup.com.au/browse-products/rubber-tracks/excavator-rubber-tracks/case/cx-75sr.html Obviously these URL's are very similar and I know that Moz judges URLs by 90% of their similarity, but is this affecting my actual raking on google? If so, what can I do? This pages are also very similar in code and content, so they are also showing as duplicate content etc as well. Worried that this is having an affect on my SERP rankings, as this pages arent ranking particularly well. Thanks, Ellie0 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
URL spacing help
Hi all, easy question: I have a client URL...example.com/giftbags that has been indexed for a while. Should I change the URL to example.com/gift-bags to separate these words for better KW ranking, or would the change be useless at this point? Thanks, -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Removing a lot of content & changing url structure.
I recently moved an existing ecommerce site, which I recently purchased, from Volusion to Shopify. The new site has a completely different link structure. The old site also had about 120 products which are not even close to being up to par with the products I now have on the site. So I had to remove all of those pages too. I was just wondering which measures I need to take to deal with this? I created a really nice 404 page. I also 301 redirected the pages which still exist. But I was wondering if there is anything else I should do? Should I request a removal of all the old pages, which no longer exist? Should I do something else I'm not thinking about? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. jim
Technical SEO | | PedroAndJobu0 -
How can I see the SEO of a URL? I need to know the progress of a specific landing-page of my web. Not a keyword, an url please. Thanks.
I need to know the evolution on SEO of a specific landing-page (an URL) of my web. Not a keyword, a url. Thanks. (Necesito saber si es posible averiguar el progreso de una URL específica en el posicionamiento de Google. Es decir, lo que hace SEOmoz con las palabras clave pero al revés. Yo tengo una url concreta que quiero posicionar en las primeras posiciones de Google pero quiero ver cómo va progresando en función a los cambios que le voy aplicando. Muchas gracias)
Technical SEO | | online_admiral0 -
Magento URL Question
Calling all Magento Kings out there! I'm working on a client' site - powered by magento. I'm looking to rewrite a lot of the URLs. I know there is the URL rewrite tool, but I think what I need to do may go beyond this. Typical example would be: Old URL - http://www.xxxxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/product-black-screen-print-and-silver-fabric.html New URL - http://www.xxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/silver I know that magento's URLs seem to be created through categories so wanted to double check with someone the best way to do this. Also, I've heard that 301 redirects of non www to www in the .htaccess has a knock on effect on discounts? All comments greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital0 -
URL Length
What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.
Technical SEO | | Romancing0 -
URLs: To Change or Not to Change
Hello, We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this: /africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania /central-south-america/galapagos-islands My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2. /central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises My questions are: Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to? This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem? Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post. 😉 Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0