Non-Canonical Pages still Indexed. Is this normal?

[DRSearchEngOpt]

I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes.  So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's.  Problem is this has not quite worked.  I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago.

This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them.  Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why?

I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job.  Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's.  In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work.

Examples Below-

Old Pages:

www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235

New Pages:

www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name

Canonical tag on both pages:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.

[AlanMosley]

You seem to have done everything ok, but from my understanding google does not honer 301's or caninicals first crawl, they wait a few times to make sure its not a mistake.

What sort of server are you using? if you are using windows with iis7 is is very easy to impliment the urlrewites and corasponding 301's

i would 301, a canonical is a hint, a301 is a directive. and also if people stil go to your old pages, they may make a link to the old page rather then the new url.

[DRSearchEngOpt]

I get the part about the 301's and I believe we have iis7 but between departments, just not as simple of a change especially regarding the number of products I have to do this for, 800+.

Regarding the links to the old URL, it was my belief that with the canonical tag, that weight should transfer over to the the new URL as well or was I mistaken on that?

[DRSearchEngOpt]

Also do you know of any documentation that states that it takes a few passes for a canonical tag to be honored and also for 301's as well?  That would really help me explain my initial thoughts on using the canonical tag.

[AlanMosley]

Yes they should, but 301's and canonicals leak link juice, so you want your links to go directly to the correct page where you can.

See half way down this page, you will see just how easy it is to do all this, with a few clicks.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/microsoft-technologies-and-seo-web-development

for you it may not be quiest as easy as you are converting from id to product name, but if you look into the url rewrite module a bit further you will see it is posible to do this once for all pages

[AlanMosley]

Matt cutts has said it a few times in videos, i could not tell you what ones without doing a far bit of searching.

[DRSearchEngOpt]

Alan, I appreciate the help.  I will go with this and see what happens and try to find those videos.  Graci.

[EGOL]

Yes... I agree with Alan.  Canonical is a hint.

We put rel=canonical on about 250 pages in early February.   As of today about 1/2 of those pages are still in the SERPs.  The numbers are falling but this is really really slow to implement.

If you have done everything correctly it will probably work but requires patience.

[Dr-Pete]

It can take a while. I disagree very slightly with Alan and EGOL on one point - while 301s are traditionally more appropriate here, I often find that canonicals are pretty strong (and more than a hint). Both suffer the same problem, though - the signal has to be crawled and processed, and that doesn't always take right away. I haven't seen any reports on it taking 2, 3, etc. times to happen, but I've definitely seen a page re-cache without the indexation signals beign honored.

Are these true duplicates or did something change in the interim a bit? If the duplicates don't seem like true duplicates or you put 1000s of them out there all at once, Google could choose to ignore the canonicals.

If these really seem stuck, though, switching to 301s is harmless, and for a permanent URL change, it is probably the better way to go. I wouldn't expect that to kick in instantly either, though.