301 vs 410 for subdirectory that was moved to a new domain, 2-years later

[halloranc]

Hi all,

I've read a lot about 301 vs 404 and 410s, but the case is pretty unique so I decided to get some feedback from you.

Both websites are travel related but we had one destination as a subdirectory of the other one (two neighboring countries, where more than 90% of business was related to the 'main' destination and the rest to the 'satellite'). This was obviously bad practice and we decided to move the satellite destination to its own domain. Everything was done 2 years ago and we opted for 301s to the new domain as we had some good links pointing to satellite content. (All of the moved content is destination specific and still relevant)

Few weeks back we figured out that google still shows our subdirectory when doing specific 'site:' search and looking further into it, we realized we still get traffic for satellite destination through the main website via links acquired before the move. Not a lot of hits, but they still sporadically occur. A decision was made (rather hastily) to 410 pages and see if that will make satellite subdir pages not show in google searches. So 3 weeks in, 410 errors are climbing in GWMT, but satellite subdirectory still shows in google searches. One part of the team is pushing to put back in place 301s. The other part of the team is concerned with the 'health' of the main website as those pages are not relevant for it, and want them gone .

What would you do?

[LauraSultan]

Just because Google shows the sub URL in a "site:sub.example.com'" search does not necessarily mean it shows the sub URL for natural searches. Do you have evidence that Google shows the sub page for normal searches? You may be making an issue out of something that isn't much of an issue.

I suspect you had it right the first time with the 301-redirects from main to satellite pages.

[halloranc]

Hi Laura,

Thank you for your feedback. This was a problem for the first couple of months, but we don't have the issue of the main domain showing up in SERPs anymore.

What is interesting is that although we applied 410 to these pages three weeks ago--they still show.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Google is adding and removing URLs from its index fairly slowly right now, and it's not uncommon for changes to take several weeks to filter up into the index, especially for site: searches. This is very annoying (even more so for people who are trying to launch brand-new sites), but not a huge deal since, to Laura's point, these URLs are most likely not showing up for any searches, they just haven't filtered out of the index. I would give it another week or two and see what happens. You may also want to do a Fetch+Submit in Search Console for a few of the subdirectory URLs, to make sure that Google revisits them and registers that they are 410s now - if they've been redirecting for 2 years, Google may just not be crawling them that frequently.