Spammy Structured Data Markup Removal

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Hi There,

I'm in a weird situation and I am wondering if you can help me.

Here we go,  We had some of our developers implement structured data markup on our site, and they obviously did not know what they were doing. They messed up our results in the SERP big time and we wound up getting manually penalized for it. We removed those markups and got rid of that penalty (phew), however now we are still stuck with two issues.

We had some pages that we changed their URLs, so the old URLs are now dead pages getting redirected to the newer version of the same old page, however, two things now happened:

a) for some reason two of the old dead pages still come up in the Google SERP, even though it's over six weeks since we changed the URLs. We made sure that we aren't linking to the old version of the url anywhere from our site.

b) those two old URLs are showing up in the SERP with the old spammy markup. We don't have anywhere to remove the markup from cause there are no such pages anymore so obviously there isn't this markup code anywhere anymore.

We need a solution for getting the markup out of the SERP.

We thought of one idea that might help - create new pages for those old URLs, and make sure that there is nothing spammy in there, and we should tell google not to index these pages - hopefully, that will get Google to de-index those pages.

Is this a good idea, if yes, is there anything I should know about, or watch out for? Or do you have a better one for me?

Thanks so much

[andy.bigbangthemes]

Hey there,

It's definitely not that good of an idea to re-do the old url's. Have you submitted the site to be reindexed? Make sure you update your sitemap if needed (and/or robots) and reupload these to google. Then wait. Any additional changes might confuse G even more. Make sure to 301 the old pages to the new ones.

If you still need help with the schema code drop me a PM.

Have a great day

Andy

[mememax]

Hi Yosepgr,

one thing I would like to clarify IMO is that dev needs SEO guidance on how to implement schema. Sometimes people just request schema implementation and then wait for dev to do it. I'm not saying is your case but we, as SEO, should provide technical guidance on how to correctly implement that.

That being said I had a similar case in the past and what I did was creating a sitemap including just the dead URLs. I this way I was forcing google to crawl them and see that they now redirect to the new version.

After doing so, ensure that your redirect is actually a permanent redirect (301). You can check that easily with screaming frog by crawling those URLs in list mode or get the ayima plugin for chrome and visit the URL so you can see what the header response look like. Ensure that the redirect is 301 and with just 1 step (if possible).

It may take a while for google to digest the but you shouldn't be worried about schema as if google is penalizing your site for spammy markup, it will penalize only pages containing that markup which are now dead and removed from the site.

I hope this helps!

e

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

thanks for your answer,

Should I create a sitemap with only dead pages? and then have two sitemaps?

let me know, please.

[mememax]

yes just create one you can call 301-sitemap.xml and submit it to google webmaster tools. This is a separate one from your full sitemap as when you ll get those pages removed from google seeps you can just delete it without affecting your normal sitemap.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Thanks so much

I'll try that right away