Google shows deleted pages
- SEO |
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?
Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.
What's your excuse?