removing old URL - Google

H

HRobertson

New Member
Hello -

I have changed several page names on my current site. Is there a way to remove the old pages that were indexed in Google. Since it was just a page name change, and no longer does the old page exist, I cannot just add the <meta name=”ROBOTS” content “NOINDEX”> tag. I have submitted URL removal requests from Google (that supposedly removed my page), yet they are still appearing in my index stats. All pages that I want to remove are 404s.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

HRobertson
 
conor

conor

New Member
Don't know how to un-index them but I do know a work around. You have three choices. PHP, HTML or JavaScript re-directs. I advise PHP because it works on the server side and will be much much quicker for this task. Hopefully so quick that you will not notice the difference. If you opt for HTML or JavaScript then the page will have to load fully and then re-direct which will be considerably slower.

Anyway what you have to do is make a file named the same as your old file. Say google has indexed home.html and you have renamed the page to about.html then create a new file called home.html and use re-direct to move all incoming users from the old one to the new:

Code: 
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; about.html"/>

Or if you want to use PHP to re-direct users from home.php to about.php then do this:

Code: 
<?php
header('location: about.php');
?>

There is an even better option than both of those combined using Apache's mod_rewrite module. This code only works on servers running Apache and should be placed in the document root in a file named '.htaccess'. It takes all the requests for home.html and re-writes them as about.html. This is without a doubt the most seemless method and the user will not notice a thing:

Code: 
Redirect http://domain.com/home.html http://domain.com/about.html

Let me know if you have any problems with this.

As for google. You will just have to be patient and wait. If they are very popular links then it could take a while...
 
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