Duplicate Pages on GWT when redesigning website
-
Hi, we recently redesigned our online shop. We have done the 301 redirects for all product pages to the new URL (and went live about 1.5 week ago), but GWT indicated that the old product URL and the new product URL are 2 different pages with the same meta title tags (duplication) - when in fact, the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL when visited.
I found this article on google forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/CvCjeNOxOUw
It says we either just wait for Google to re-crawl, of use the fetch URL function for the OLD URLs. Question is, after i fetch the OLD URL to tell Google that it's being redirected, should i click the button 'submit to index' or not? (See screengrab - please note that it was the OLD URL that was being fetched, not the NEW URL). I mean, if i click this button, is it telling Google that:a. 'This old URL has been redirected, therefore please index the new URL'? or
b. 'Please keep this old URL in your index'?What's your view on this? Thanks
-
Hi,
I migrated a load of product category pages on one of my websites recently to cleaner URLs and to force the crawl I submitted the new URLs (and children) to index via WMT. This was to pick them up quickly - and it worked (within seconds). The old URLs appearing were never a problem. However there are limits to the number of times you can do this so that might be a sticking point for your solution as I'm guessing you have lots of products. Try it with one page (a low traffic and selling product!) and see what happens - and let us know.
It's possible Google is holding onto your old URLs because they have a number of inbound links and the crawl will eventually catch up to only display the new URLs if you give it time.
Aside from agreeing with the sitemap submission suggestion, I'd also triple check that your 301s / canonicals are set up properly on your website's old URLs by firing Screaming Frog or another crawler at it.
George
-
Have you resubmitted your sitemap? That is a slightly simpler step. Personally I would wait for the pages to be indexed. This should really only take about 2 weeks. The SERP might reflect the old site until then, but if your rankings are good then that is a good thing for your SEO.
I don't think that fetching in this case will correctly reindex your site. The wait and see game is going to be your best chance at getting the natural response you want from Google without sacrificing your existing rankings.
-
Honestly speaking, I am sick of this Google Webmaster Tool delay in update… most of the time it shows me the days of months old when the website will be completely changed it will still talking about the old problems…
My first suggestion is to wait and I believe after few crawls it will understand that they have moved on from the problem you had before.
The image you attached will only tell you if the redirection is properly working or not and if the user is shorting from old page to the new one that means it is working.
I believe another thing you people can do is to give a social bump to your new pages and at the same time request Google to de-index the page. GWT have this option somewhere.
Hope this helps!
-
Sorry, forgot to attach.
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
-
Duplicate pages with "/" and without "/"
I seem to have duplicate pages like the examples below: https://example.com https://example.com/ This is happening on 3 pages and I'm not sure why or how to fix it. The first (https://example.com) is what I want and is what I have all my canonicals set too, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything. I've also setup 301 redirects for each page with "/" to be redirected to the page without it. Doing this didn't seem to fix anything as when I use the (https://example.com/) URL it doesn't redirect to (https://example.com) like it's supposed to. This issue has been going on for some time, so any help would be much appreciated. I'm using Squarespace as the design/hosting site.
Technical SEO | | granitemountain0 -
My website's pages are not being indexed correctly
Hi, One of our websites, which is actually a price comparison engine, facing indexing problem at Google. When we check “site:mywebsite.com “, there are lots of pages indexed which are not from mywebsite.com but from merchants websites. The index result page also shows merchant’s page title. In some cases the title is from merchant’s site but when the given link is accessed it points to mywebsite.com/index. Also the cache displays the merchant’s product page as the last indexed version rather than showing ours. The mywebsite.com has quite few Merchants that send us their product feed. Those products are listed on comparison page with prices. The merchant’s links on comparison page are all no-follow links but some of the (not all) merchant’s product pages are indexed against mywebsite.com as mentioned above instead of product comparison page of mywebsite.com How can we fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digitalMSB0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
When Is It Good To Redirect Pages on Your Site to Another Page?
Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Duplicate Page Title for Wordpress
Hello, We are using WP for our blog and keep getting Dup Page Title errors for our 12 author archives pages. The title of each page is the same, but I am wondering if this is WP issue with canonicalization working properly. The most recent four pages have a linking root domain and carry some Page Authority, but the older pages do not. Is this what Rand was talking about in his Google+ whiteboard Friday talk about blog post relevancy not lasting as long as articles? Here's what it looks like. Side question, is there a reason why the SEO Moz website doesn't have a Google+ button anywhere easy to find? Thank you, Michael
Technical SEO | | MKaloud1 -
Catch 22 on duplicate page titles
Hi all, I'm quite new to the SEO space so I apologise if all the information below isn't technically perfect. I ran the SEOmoz pro tool for the first time a month ago (fantastic tool). It picked up a wealth of errors on our site that we are now working on. the problem: we use dynamic pages to display job listings pulled from our database that have picked up many duplicate page titles and content. For example: _Landing page: _http://www.arm.co.uk/jobs/it-contract-jobs/sec=itcontractjobs _Page 2: _http://www.arm.co.uk/jobs/1/-/-/2/itcontractjobs-/9999/2 _Page 3: _http://www.arm.co.uk/jobs/1/-/-/2/itcontractjobs-/9999/3 Following the results of the Moz tool we have now 'no indexed' and 'no followed' the dynamic pages and the errors have dramatically dropped, great! However, on reflection we generate quite a lot of traffic to individual job's listed on our website. By no following the pages we have restricted passing on any 'juice' to these pages, and by no indexing we may be taking them out of Googles index completely. These dynamic pages and individual job listings do generate a lot of traffic to our website via organic search. We do submit the site index to Google that should index the individual jobs that way. So, the question is (I hope this is making sense), are the gains of reducing errors picked up in the moz tool (to improve the overall site performance) likely to outweigh the traffic generated on these dynamically generated pages by being indexed and followed by Google. Ultimately we would like the static landing pages to retain a stronger page rank. Any guidance is very much appreciated. Best Regards,
Technical SEO | | ARMofficial
Sam.0 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0