Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index

[trung.ngo]

I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed.

My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index.

Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?

[FedeEinhorn]

How about using the robots file to disallow those pages? However, if you have a 301 and in the new page a noindex it should work (but who knows, they are still showing the old URLs after a year).

Did to try using the "Fetch as Googlebot"? in WMT? if not, go ahead and then hit the "submit to index" that usually speeds up big changes in sites.

Hope that helps.

[CommT]

Hi there,

You can use your robots.txt to noindex the incorrect URLs, then via webmaster tools you can request to have the incorrect pages removed from Google's index. (Webmaster Tools > Google Index > Remove URLs). There is a help document here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/59819?hl=en

Good luck!

Amelia