Old pages STILL indexed...
-
Our new website has been live for around 3 months and the URL structure has completely changed. We weren't able to dynamically create 301 redirects for over 5,000 of our products because of how different the URL's were so we've been redirecting them as and when.
3 months on and we're still getting hundreds of 404 errors daily in our Webmaster Tools account. I've checked the server logs and it looks like Bing Bot still seems to want to crawl our old /product/ URL's. Also, if I perform a "site:example.co.uk/product" on Google or Bing - lots of results are still returned, indicating the both still haven't dropped them from their index.
Should I ignore the 404 errors and continue to wait for them to drop off or should I just block /product/ in my robots.txt? After 3 months I'd have thought they'd have naturally dropped off by now!
I'm half-debating this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /some-directory-for-all/*User-agent: Bingbot
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /product/Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml
-
Yea. If you cannot do it dynamically, it gets to be a real PIA, and also, depending on how you setup the 301s, you may get an overstuffed .htaccess file that could cause problems.
If these pages were so young and did not have any link equity or rank to start with, they are probably not worth 301ing.
One tool you may want to consider is URLprofiler http://urlprofiler.com/ You could take all the old URLs and have URL profiler pull in GA data (from when they were live on your site) and then also pull in OSE data from Moz. You can then filter them and see what pages got traffic and links. Take those select "top pages" and make sure they 301 to the correct page on the new URL structure and then go from there. URL profiler has a free 15 day trial that you could use for this project and get done at no charge. But after using the product, you will see it is pretty handy and may buy anyway.
Ideally, if you could have dynamically 301ed the old pages to the new, that would have been the simplest method, but with your situation, I think you are ok. Google is just trying to help to make sure you did not "mess up" and 404 those old pages on accident. It wants to give you the benefit of the doubt. It is crazy sometimes how they keep things in the index.
I am monitoring a site that scraped one of my sites. They shut the entire site down after we threatened legal action. The site has been down for weeks and showing 404s, but I can still do a site: search and see them in the index. Meh.
-
Forgot to add this - just some free advice. You have your CSS inlined in your HTML. Ideally, you want to have that in an external CSS file. That way, once the user loads that external file, they do not have to download it multiple times so the experience is faster on subsequent pages.
If you were testing your page with Google site speed and they mentioned render blocking CSS issues and that is why you inlined your CSS, the solution is not to inline all your CSS, but to just inline what is above the fold and put the rest in an external file.
Hope that makes sense.
-
I suppose that's the problem. We've spent hours redirecting hundreds of 404 pages to new/relevant locations - but these pages don't receive organic traffic. It's mostly just BingBot, MSNBot and GoogleBot crawling them because they're still indexed.
I think I'm going to leave them as 404 rather than trying to keep on top of 301 redirecting them and I'll leave it in Google's hands to eventually drop them off!
Thanks!
Liam
-
General rule of thumb, if a page 404s and it is supposed to 404 dont worry about it. The Search Console 404 report does not mean that you are being penalized although it can be diagnostic. If you block the 404 pages in robots.txt yea, it will take the 404 errors out of the Search Console report, but then Google never "deals" with those 404s. It can take 3 months (maybe longer) to get things out of Search Console, I have noticed it taking longer here lately, but what you need to do first is ask the following questions
-
Do I still link internally to any of these /product/ URLs? If you do, Google may assume that you are 404ing those pages by mistake and leave them in the report longer as if you are still linking internally to them they must be a viable page.
-
Do any of these old URLs have value? Do they have links to them from external sites? Did they used to rank for a KW? You should probably 301 them to a semantically relevant page then vs 404ing and getting some use out of them.
If you have either of the above, Google may continue to remind you of the 404 as it thinks the page might be valuable and want to "help" you out.
You mention 5,000 URLs that were indexed and then you 404 them. You cannot assume that Search Console works in real time or that Google checks all 5,000 of these URLs at the same time. Google has a given crawl budget for your site on how often it will crawl a given page. Some pages they crawl more often (home page) some pages they crawl less often. They then have to process those crawls once they get the data back. What you will see in a situation like this is that if you 404 several thousand pages, you will first see several hundred show up in your Search Console report, then the next day some more, then some more, etc. Over time, the total will build and then may peak and then gradually start to fall off. Google has to find the 404s, process them and then show them in the report. You may see 500 of your 404 pages today, but then 3 months later, there may be 500 other 404 pages that show up in the report and those original 500 are now gone. This is why you might be seeing 404 errors after 3 months in addition to the examples I gave above.
It would be great if the process were faster and the data was cleaner. The report has a checkbox for "this is fixed" and that is great if you fixed something, but they need a checkbox for "this is supposed to 404" to help clear things out. If I have learned anything about Search Console, it is helpful, but the data in many cases is not real time.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Very Old Pages Creeping Up - Advice
We are currently having very old pages dating back 5+ years ago appearing on moz all of a sudden, we don't necessarily get traffic from these links anymore and i doubt they still hold any weight. Currently they take you to a 404 page, would there be any worth in redirecting these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp0 -
Glossary index and individual pages create duplicate content. How much might this hurt me?
I've got a glossary on my site with an index page for each letter of the alphabet that has a definition. So the M section lists every definition (the whole definition). But each definition also has its own individual page (and we link to those pages internally so the user doesn't have to hunt down the entire M page). So I definitely have duplicate content ... 112 instances (112 terms). Maybe it's not so bad because each definition is just a short paragraph(?) How much does this hurt my potential ranking for each definition? How much does it hurt my site overall? Am I better off making the individual pages no-index? or canonicalizing them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeadSEOlogist0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
What may cause a page not to be indexed (be de-indexed)?
Hi All, I have a main category page, a landing page, that does not appear in the SERPS at all (even if I serach for a whole sentence from it). This page once ranked high. What may cause such a punishment for a specific page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How to have pages re-indexed
Hi, my hosting company has blocked one my web site seeing it has performance problem. Result of that, it is now reactivated but my pages had to be reindexed. I have added my web site to Google Webmaster tool and I have submitted my site map. After few days it is saying: 103 number of URLs provided 39 URLs indexed I know Google doesn't promesse to index every page but do you know any way to increase my chance to get all my pages indexed? By the way, that site include pages and post (blog). Thanks for your help ! Nancy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
Best way to stop pages being indexed and keeping PageRank
If for example on a discussion forum, what would be the best way to stop pages such as the posting page (where a user posts a topic or message) from being indexed AND not diluting PageRank too? If we added them to the Disallow on robots.txt, would pagerank still flow through the links to those blocked pages or would it stay concentrated on the linking page? Your ideas and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640