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.
My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?
-
I have built a new website and have redirected all my old URL's to their new ones but for some reason Google is still indexing the old URL's.
Also, the page authority for all of my pages has dropped to 1 (apart from the homepage) but before they were between 12 to 15. Can anyone help me with this?
-
It can take months for Google to start deindexing old URLs.
Have you done a search in Google to see what pages they are still indexing? You can type in site:"Your Website" and it will give you the full results of URLs that are indexed. If there are any that shouldn't be, you can fetch and render them in GWT to force Google to crawl the 301 redirect, which should expedite the process. I am sure you submitted a new sitemap once you made all of your changes, but, if you haven't that could also help speed up the process.
-
Our data in OSE can lag a bit, but I'm concerned that you're seeing the same thing in Google. Is it possible to provide an example URL?
When you say "Google is still indexing the old URLs", can you tell me exactly how you're measuring that (I find "indexing" means a lot of things to a lot of different people). It's not uncommon for both the old and new version to be stuck in the index for a while, and that's not always a bad sign. It can be, but it might not be (I realize that's not terribly helpful).
Have you double-checked some of these redirects with a header checker? It's amazing how often a redirect is supposedly in place but isn't working properly, is producing multiple hops, etc.
-
Thanks for your help Ryan but we updated our website 2 months ago and there still has been no results, so we are quite concerned.
-
Right. That's due to updating after the Open Site Explorer update. Once Moz recrawls your site it will apply the changes and you'll see the numbers as they were previously. It sounds like you've made these changes VERY recently. Any redirection of pages (even if they're on the same domain) take a bit of time to be fully recognized by search engines and Moz's OSE.
-
Thank you for the responses but we aren't changing to a new domain, we have update our old website and changed a few URL's and redirected them but Moz is saying that there aren't any links on the page when there are and the page authority apart from the homepage is 1?
-
If you have redirected the URLs correctly you should fatch the homepage as Google in WMT and send them including all refereing links. the new URLs are pretty fast in SERPs than.
The rest is like Ryan Purkey said - thumb up
-
How recently have you made these changes? Have you also utilized the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools? PA changes per OSE update, so if you ran these changes after the last update, you won't see new numbers until the next release: http://moz.com/products/api/updates (March 11th) Cheers!
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
-
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
URL too long. Shorten and redirect, or leave alone?
MOZ is indicating that i have several URLs that are too long. Should I shorten the URLs and redirect the long URLs to the new, shorter, URL? Or should i leave them alone, as I've been reading to avoid redirects.
Technical SEO | | Hanover4401 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Index.php and 301 redirect with Joomla
Hi, I'm running Joomla 1.7 with SEF on and I'm trying to do a htaccess redirect which fails. I have approximately 100 in effect so far and all working fine, but I have one snag. Index.php is not working as I need it to when it's redirected to www.myurl.com/ If I turn on index.php redirect to root using this code #index.php to root
Technical SEO | | NaescentAdam
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myurl.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.myurl.com$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.myurl.com/" [R=301,L] And then go to www.myurl.com/test.html I'm redirected to the homepage. I think this is because all pages are index.php in joomla. SEOMOZ and Google both think that index.php and root are duplicate pages. Does anyone have any advice for overcoming this? Thanks, Adam0 -
What's the SEO impact of url suffixes?
Is there an advantage/disadvantage to adding an .html suffix to urls in a CMS like WordPress. Plugins exist to do it, but it seems better for the user to leave it off. What do search engines prefer?
Technical SEO | | Cornucopia0