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.
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
-
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed.
Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
-
Redirected URLs are generally removed from the index pretty quickly. I just checked and the /solutions URL is not indexed in Google, so you don't need to take additional measures to have that removed.
A good practice is to have no redirects in your sitemap. When I run new sitemaps, I use Screaming Frog and the first thing I do is remove everything that isn't a 200 status code. Keeping a clean XML sitemap helps your crawl budget and gets bots to focus on the more important parts of your site rather than having them step through unnecessary steps.
-
Why do you have it set up that way to begin with? Could you put the content on the higher level page? Or is it meant to be an easy-to-remember "vanity" URL? In any case, yes, do not put a page with no content in your sitemap.
And to get it to stop showing up in search, you can add a canonical to the page, pointing to the deeper page with the actual content.
-
Hi Jeff,
Yes, you should remove the blank page from sitemap. This will not de-index the previuos indexed.
If there aren't lots of pages, after updating the sitemap and updating Search Console with that sitemap, send request to remove those from the index.
That can be done in the Search Console account too.Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
301 redirect from dynamic url to static page
Hi, i want to redirect from this old link http://www.g-store.gr/product_info.php?products_id=1735/ to this one https://www.g-store.gr/golf-toualetas.html I have done several attempts but with no result. I anyone can help i will appreciate. My website runs in an Apache server with cpanel. Thank you
Technical SEO | | alstam0 -
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?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
301 Redirect on a PDF, DOCX files?
Hi, I have to rename many pdf and docx files. How can I implement 301 redirect on them as they are linked from 'n' number of places? Regards, Shailendra Sial
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner1 -
What tools produce a complete list of all URLs for 301 redirects?
I am project managing the rebuild of a major corporate website and need to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. The problem is that the old site sits on multiple CMS platforms so there is no way I can get a list of pages from the old CMS. Is there a good tool out there that will crawl through all the sites and produce a nice spreadsheet with all the URLs on it? Somebody mentioned Xenu but I have never used it. Any recommendations? Thanks -Adrian
Technical SEO | | Adrian_Kingwell0 -
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
Technical SEO | | Evo0 -
Do search engines still index/crawl private content?
If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?
Technical SEO | | christinarule1
