Old URL that has been 301'd for months appearing in SERPs
-
We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December. That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url. The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php.
Has anyone else experienced such a thing?
I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.
-
Forget it... I know this answer. I've already fetched the previous url in GSC and it shows as redirected. Google is seeing it properly but for some reason still showing it in SERPs.
-
Yes Nicholas, I've done all of that. As I stated above, the New URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. Yet, months later, we are still seeing the old underscored url, that 301's, show up in the SERP.
I have to believe this is a bug with the google index vs individual google's page valuation relative to the link graph. It's as if Google is confused because the legacy, underscored URL has all of the link equity but Googlebot isn't seeing the 301...
God, maybe that's it. How do I know if Googlebot is seeing the 301?
-
I have seen this before and and a good way to help google index the new URL is to use Google Search Console. Once you have verified your website in Search Console (is you haven't already), go to the Fetch and Render section, and then imput the new URL and once it is done Fetching and Rendering, push the Request to index button. This should help Google index the new URL faster.
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
-
Need Magento SEO expert for 301 clean up - any reco's?
My site is a total mess from a clean “crawling” perspective. We are still getting traffic and doing business, but I am afraid from an SEO perspective we are driving with the parking brake on. There a lot of 301’s and some of them are causing 404 errors. Below is an overview of my 5 year old magento site which was moved from a 5 year old xcart site (so there is a lot of old junk (url’s) in there). It needs cleaning up and I need a plan and seo / 301 help. Overview: Recently moved from http to https - not sure best practices were followed, but we had lots of crawl issues before this move. Analytics Top 100 Landing Pages = 82.7% of entrances Webmaster Tools 594 Pages Indexed 65 Not found errors - most involve 301’s - examples below Sitemap: 773 Submitted, 395 Indexed URL Parameters - 41 - I can’t tell if they are doing anything (helping or hurting) Moz Crawl Total Pages 3,454 324 Redirect Issues (258 Temp and 66 Chain) Magento 11,773 Redirects 5390 System 6383 Custom On July 15, 2017 I deleted 40 redirects from htaccess that a developer had put there that were causing problems. Blog We have a wordpress blog installed on Magento site. Years ago it was moved from a subdomain to a subdirectory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
Canonical URL's For Two Domains
We have two websites, one we use for Google PPC (website 1) and one (website 2) we use for everything else. The reason is we are in an industry that Google Adwords doesn't like, so we built a whole other website that removes the product descriptions as Google Adwords doesn't approve of many of them (nutrition). Right now we have that Google Adwords approved website (website 1) no-index/no-follow because we didn't want to run into potential duplicate content issues in free search, but the issue is we can't submit it to Google Shopping...as they require it to be indexable. Do you think removing the no-index/no-follow from that website 1 and adding canonical URL's pointing to website 2 would resolve this issue (being able to submit it to Google Shopping) and not cause any problems with duplicate content? I was thinking of adding the canonical tag to all pages of website 1 and point it to website 2. Does that make sense? Do you think that would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
301 Redirect? How to leverage the traffic on our old domain.
I've seen multiple questions about this but there's a few different answers on ways to approach it. Figured I'd personally ask for our situation. Any advice would be appreciated. We formed a new company with a new name / domain while at the same time buying an existing company in our industry. The domain and site of the company we acquired is ranking for some valuable keywords and still getting a significant amount of traffic (about half of what our new site is getting). A big downside has been, when they moved that site to a different server, something happened to where the site became uneducable so it's full of bad pricing and information. Because of that, we've had a maintenance page up for a little bit because it was generating calls to our sales team (GOOD) but the customer was having seen incredibly incorrect information (BAD) Rather than correcting those issues or figuring out why the site is un-editable, we just want to find a way where we can leverage that traffic and have them end up at our new site. Would we 301 redirect the entire domain to our new one? If we did that would the old domain still keep the majority of it's page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HuskyCargo1 -
Should I include www in url, or doesn't it matter?
Hello Mozzers, I was just wondering whether Google prefers www or non www URLs? Or doesn't it matter? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Will Canonical tag on parameter URLs remove those URL's from Index, and preserve link juice?
My website has 43,000 pages indexed by Google. Almost all of these pages are URLs that have parameters in them, creating duplicate content. I have external links pointing to those URLs that have parameters in them. If I add the canonical tag to these parameter URLs, will that remove those pages from the Google index, or do I need to do something more to remove those pages from the index? Ex: www.website.com/boats/show/tuna-fishing/?TID=shkfsvdi_dc%ficol (has link pointing here)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf
www.website.com/boats/show/tuna-fishing/ (canonical URL) Thanks for your help. Rob0 -
Url rewrite & 301 redirects
Hi all I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products. The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands The current urls for products are : index.php?l=product_detail&c=1&p=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands/banner-stand Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vividwebdesign0 -
Does URL format affect Keyword effectiveness for a URL?
I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure. I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like. For example I would like to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford-convertibles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SL_SEM
www.example.com/chevy-convertibles But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford/convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/convertibles But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page: www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive. There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx" Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?0 -
Export list of urls in google's index?
Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0