Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore.

But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again.

The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version.

Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

That's pretty odd. Only thing I can think of is Google received more signals to rank the .nl site (maybe some new backlinks were found/created?) Overall, sounds like a bug that should be reversed.. how long have the ranking reverted for?

Note, that you can still rank for some Dutch keywords if you received backlinks with dutch anchor text.

[DonnaDuncan]

I've seen that happen before Martin. Is it possible the old (.nl) version of the site is still sitting on a server somewhere and getting accessed (and indexed) by Google?