I physically changed my URL and now I have two...How do I get rid of the old one?

[CoGri]

Hi, I physically changed my URL as something else and now Google thinks I have two duplicate pages (I know not to do this in the future).

e.g. I had www.example.com/i-like-seo.aspx

and changed it to:

www.example.com/i-love-seo.aspx

Google sees this as two pages now and my CMS system is only showing one page (The new page) Also, SEOMOZ is seeing two pages and further more sees them both as having two different amounts of inbound links?

When I change content on the new url page, the old url page also updates. I'm really confused as to what has happened here and don't know how to get rid of the old url so that Google doesn't think that I have duplicate content.

Any help to what has happened or how to fix it would be so helpful and appreciated.

Many thanks.

[littlesthobo]

Hi

Technically there are two pages - the old one and the new one.  That's the way Google will see it.  You need to point the old page at the new page with a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.

Are you using wordpress?  You can get an easy plugin called 'redirection'

Here are the SEOMoz best practises around redirecting.

By the way, are you in Hudds?  I'm just over the hill in Elland!

[CoGri]

Hi Jo,

Thanks for getting back to me. I'm not using word press, my company uses a third party web developer. I have already requested the web developer to do a 301 redirect and this is what they said:

"Solving the problems by 301 permanent re directs are out of the question as this would create infinite loops. Likely to bring down our server."

What do you think to this reply from my web developer? I personally have never heard anything like this before.

Yes, we are based in Huddersfield. I guess that makes us neighbors 

Again, many thanks for your advice.

Tom

[Sean_Dawes]

The website is not on wordpress. In their example, the url ends with .aspx which is .NET not wordpress which is php.

To give you an example, we have a client on asp and we had the dev implement a url rewrite as the old urls were not pretty.

ex: www.example.com/categories.asp?id=12 was the old url so we have a field on the category backend called rewrite which we put in new-category and it not only is rewriting that category url to www.example.com/new-category.aspx but it also 301 redirects /categories.asp?id=12 to /new-category

Make sense?

[littlesthobo]

hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.

You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops..  (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).

At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary.  You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.

[littlesthobo]

whoops, I didn't spot that, I just saw the example and didnt read the finer details!

[irvingw]

If the old page has no PR and no traffic just 404 it or noindex it and you can canonical it to the other page.

if the old page has PR and you cannot 301 for some weird reason, just rewrite the content on the new page to make it unique and keep both pages

[CoGri]

Hi Sean,

Am I right by thinking that it should then be possible for my web developer to redirect the old URL to the new one?

In your opinion is .NET an old CMS system? If so do you think it is worth updating?

Many thanks,

[CoGri]

Hi Irving,

Many thanks for the advice. The thing that I'm most confused about is that my web developer (whom is third party) is telling me that this is the same page but two different URLs, Hence I can't add code or alter one as they are the same thing.

I looked into removing the cache in Google, but I can't do this as they ask you to type a word that is present in your new page but not in your old one, but obviously I cant do this as its "apparently" one page.

Do you think that there may be an issue with my web developers CMS system?

Again, many thanks

[irvingw]

Weird, sounds like it. Ask them if they delete the page completely in the CMS and create it again if there will only be one URL then?

You can block one of the URLs in your robots.txt file, since it's the same page and you can't add a noindex or canonical tag to one of them without it showing on the other too, and request URL removal in the Google WMT URL removal tool. But blocking in robots.txt alone doesn't guarantee it won't get indexed again.

The sites links should be updated to point to the new URL and not reference the old URL on the site or in any sitemap.xml files.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

.NET is not a CMS system. It is a language your CMS is written in. (As in you can have the same menu in english and also in french, you could in theory have the same CMS in .php and .NET).

You'd need to give the name of the CMS if you want advice on it's suitability.

Honestly, your developer should be able to 301 from URL a to b without loops based on the info provided so far.

[CoGri]

This post is deleted!

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

Looking at the footer of your website, I see "Powered by Communications3000 C3MS"

From a quick look of the site it links to I'm guessing it's something your webdevelopers have put together rather then an 'Off The shelf" cms so to speak.

I would recomend you find an SEO who knows both SEO and some .Net who could communicate with you and your developers to see if it is indeed impossable to do a 301, or if your developers are making excuses/misunderstanding the request/e.t.c.

That would probably give a better understanding of the situation.

As everyone else has said  it /does/ sound rather odd that a 301 can't be implimented between the various ways of doing it.