How to Remove Old Comment Page Query String URLs
-
I used to use a comments program on my website that created comment pages in the form of http://www.example.com/web-page.htm?comm_page=2. When I switched to a new comments program, I worried that these old comment URLs would be considered duplicate content. I created a 301 redirect that, for example, would redirect http://www.example.com/web-page.htm?comm_page=2 to http://www.example.com/web-page.htm and disallowed them in robots.txt, which I later learned was not the thing to do.. I have removed the URLs from being disallowed in robots.txt. However, many months later, these comment page URLs keep appearing in Google's index from time to time. I use the "Remove URLs" tool in Google Webmaster Tools to remove the URLs from Google's index, but more URLs appear a few days later. How can I get rid of these URLs for good?
Thanks!
-
If you have still left the redirects in place; these should work. As they would indicate that the 'old' page redirects to the page without comments. I would also suggest adding a canonical link to all your pages. So in case you missed a redirect or you have disabled them it would tell Google that the page it is visiting is exactly the same as the one in the canonical link.
Change will not happen overnight; it will take some time; especially if you had a robots blocking Google from doing to that url, as it would have to first identify the url to be 'crawlable' then find the redirect or canonical, after that update the serps & indexes.
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
-
How to 301 trailing URLs to new domain home page - wildcard?
How would I add a redirect rule so all old domain URLs redirect to a new domain? All the old pages no longer exist on a new website. The domains have been through several CMS platforms, so it would be unnecessary to recreate them. Problem is, they're indexed in search engines from the past 10 years, so it's causing a lot of 404s. Example: search "NARI Tampa Bay" and you'll find 2 old domains: nari-tampabay.com & nari-tampabay.org. The new domain is naritb.org Those 2 old domains are now pointed to the same nameservers as the new and listed as parked domains. Here's the current rules in htaccess: <code>RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.org [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.org [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301]</code>
Technical SEO | | CartoMark0 -
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Removing a canonical tag from Pagination pages
Hello, Currently on our site we have the rel=prev/next markup for pagination along with a self pointing canonical via the Yoast Plugin. However, on page 2 of our paginated series, (there's only 2 pages currently), the canonical points to page one, rather than page 2. My understanding is that if you use a canonical on paginated pages it should point to a viewall page as opposed to page one. I also believe that you don't need to use both a canonical and the rel=prev/next markup, one or the other will do. As we use the markup I wanted to get rid of the canonical, would this be correct? For those who use the Yoast Plugin have you managed to get that to work? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jessicarcf0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0 -
How to best remove old pages for SEO
I run an accommodation web site, each listing has its own page. When a property is removed what is the best way to handle this for SEO because the URL will no longer be valid and there will be a blank page.
Technical SEO | | JamieHibbert0 -
Page Over-optimized?
I read over this post on the blog tonight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730 & it's got me concerned that I might be having a similar issue on our site? Back in March & April of last year, we ranked fairly well for a number of long tail keywords, here is one in particular 'Mio Drink' for this page: http://www.discountqueens.com/free-mio-drink-from-kraft-facebook-offer The page is still indexed, but appears back on page #3 for the search term. During this time we had made a number of different updates to our site & I can't seem to put an exact finger on what might have caused the problem? Can anyone see any issues that might have caused this to drop? Thanks, BJ
Technical SEO | | seointern0