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Google shows deleted pages

by nettiapina
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi Warriors.

We've been working actively on on-page SEO so changes in indexed URLs are something that we expect. The results have been fairly good for less competitive keywords.

However, there's a weird thing I've seen recently. I don't remember seeing this before. Google seems to index old pages that haven't been on the site for couple of months at least. It'd be normal for old pages to linger for a while, but these are popping up for searches we were already ranking for as if Google just crawled the site and found them.

They've also "found" pages that have never existed as far as I know. I've developed this site for more than a year so I'm pretty familiar with the page structures.

The old pages are something like
/course/324252/ -> redirected or just deleted

The pages that never existed are something like
/m/test-page/

Yes, it's easy to ask Google to not use these wrong URLs, and they're redirected so there's not much harm done. This is just weird to me. Anyone seen this happen?
#deleted #google #pages #shows
  • Profile picture of the author AravGupta
    At times what happen is, the developers remove the pages from sitemap or navigation bar but they are available on server so unless they are not removed or deleted from there, they will keep reflecting in the search results. It always a good practice to keep the website data clean and clear on server side. It is best to audit the data after every three months for better safety.
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    ESDS Software Solution Pvt. Ltd.
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Originally Posted by AravGupta View Post

      At times what happen is, the developers remove the pages from sitemap or navigation bar but they are available on server so unless they are not removed or deleted from there, they will keep reflecting in the search results. It always a good practice to keep the website data clean and clear on server side. It is best to audit the data after every three months for better safety.
      I'm not sure if you read my post. I'm the developer. I know what pages our team has removed, and roughly when that happened. Those pages are either 404'd or 301'd as I said.

      I've been glancing through the sitemaps quite often recently just to make sure that they're as clean as possible. I agree that audits are a good idea.
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      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
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