Removing old URLs from Google
-
Hello, I am sure that this question has been asked many times, but I am still not sure what to do about the following:
Our site's URL structure has changed a few times in the past few months. Recenty, we have changed our URLs to become more SEO friendly. However, Google has indexed the old URLs as well. To give an example:
The following page in our website shows the following URLs in Google Webmaster Tools:
/artigo/68_38/2/as_religioes_iv_confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/1_14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/_14_6132/Vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/ensino/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/
The correct URL is the last one. What should I do about the other ones? Almost all the pages in our website have this problem. We have redirected the old URLs to the new ones, but is there anything else we should do? We were asking Google to remove them, but Google has informed us that it has reached the limit.
Please advise us on waht we should do. We have removed the old sitemap with the old URLs. What else must we do?
Thank you very much.
-
Google will naturally update the URLs with the new ones if you followed the above steps. There is no need for you to take any other action.
-
Thank you very much for your help.
So there is no need to remove the URLs from Google?
-
If you properly 3xx redirect an old page to a new page, Google will update their records usually within 30 days. There are some things you can do to help ensure the process goes smoothly:
-
make sure you do NOT block any of these pages with robots.txt, as Google would then not crawl the pages and therefore not find the redirect
-
make sure you do NOT "noindex" any of the redirected pages
-
update all of the internal links on your site to ensure they go to the final target page.
-
update your sitemap to reflect the new page
Other then these steps, you just need a bit of patience.
-
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
-
Placement of key words in URL
I notice that the MOZ Page Grader considers "/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3" in a URL string to be less effective than "/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3". Is this correct from Google's perspective? If I am trying to maximise my SEO for the page title "Business building tips", for example, does Google think my URL is more relevant if it's in the form: 1. www.website.com/business-building-tips
On-Page Optimization | | Gavin.Atkinson
2. www.website.com/business/building-tips or
3. www.website.com/business/business-building-tips My instinct tells me 3 is more powerful, but logic tells me if I have a whole section devoted to "business" and one of those pages is "business building tips" then 2 should work just as well, possibly better?0 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
Google not showing the proper title
I noticed that google is not showing the proper title in the search results. If you search for PhraseExpander, the title that google reports is: PhraseExpander: Text Expander for Windows but in the title of the page I've set Text Expander for Windows - PhraseExpander Why is that? How can I make google report the proper title? Thanks. Andrea
On-Page Optimization | | nagar0 -
Google indexing page differently
Does google index an interal page differently depending on whether you are using a FULL url (including domain) or just a relative link? Also, is it possible that using a full URL (http://mysite.com/page.html) causes the browser to "ping" the server differently than just having the href linked to using relative links (/page.html) Could this cause server or firewall perfomance issues?
On-Page Optimization | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Google images hits distorting my results. What to do.
Hit from google images seem to be distroting my results. I sell airport taxis so want rid of any hots that came through google images as there no buying intent Aanlytics shows (when i click in) Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimisation > Quires 250 clicks All of which came from quires related to generic taxi terms which I do (unfortunately) rank for in search. I imagine these generated because I have a taxi cab image in page one of google images. So when people search for a picture of a taxi they click mine. However in SEO MOZ the traffic data tab shows: google = 219 clicks images.google = 3 clicks This should be the other way round shouldn't it?
On-Page Optimization | | smashseo0 -
URL extensions naming
I have always wrote URL extensions as www.mysite.com/two_words.html .... when I need to separate two words, I use _ as the separator ... I am a first time SEO Moz user ... I While looking around the tools on SEO Moz, I happened to stumble across the on-page analysis. A great tool indeed, rather worryingly though, one issue it flagged to me was my URL extension "Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems." Can someone advice me if this really is a problem, its just not this project, its tons of sites I have already developed that I am also worried about ... I always write file extensions with more than one word using _ to separate the words. How should I write the extension, I am almost embarrassed to ask this question ... Surely, even Google's algorithms are not smart enough to decipher two words without some some sort of spacing .... Regards J
On-Page Optimization | | Johnny4B0 -
Absolute vs Relative URLs
What are the pros and cons of these two types of URLs and what type of weight does this hold. It doesn't seem to be a big issue in regards to ranking. Any qualified clarity would help.
On-Page Optimization | | Romancing0