Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration

[pissuptours]

Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!

[JohnSammon]

Hey Rasmus,

In finding these index pages, I'm assuming that you did the following:

1. no-indexed the pages from the domain you are concerned about

2. dis-allowed them in robots.txt (just another step to help speed up things)

3. Used the URL removal tool in Google Search Console

Unfortunately, it does take time for Google to process these URL's out of the SERPS. Hopefully, you are seeing a decrease in the URLs shown in the SERPS

Also, don't forget to do this via the Bing Search Console too!

[pissuptours]

Hi John

Thanks for taking your time to answer!

The URL's were already showing 301 or 404 when we discovered them after launching new site

What we did so far was this:

1. set up 301 redirect from pissup.com/german-url to pissup.com/english-equivalent where available or closest similar page
2. added a sitemap with these URL's with the hope they'd be crawled faster
3. Wait

We were advised it was better to redirect than to ask for removal. Do you disagree with this advice, and what makes you think so?

We're really seeing an increase yet for these issues in the SERPS. Some decrease by 5-10%, but some don't. Can it be because we are not seeing them all in SERPS, and in that case is there anywhere else we could find them (all url's indexed by google on our domain)?

[JohnSammon]

Hey Rasmus,

Just so I understand - a url like this: https://www.pissup.de/package/basic-survival-4/, should not be displaying on the german site. The german site should just have german right?

I found that page doing the site search listed in your initial question.

What's interesting is that this page isn't redirecting. Let me know your thoughts. I have feedback but I want to make sure of a few things before I share it.

Thanks!

John

[pissuptours]

Hi John

Yes, the idea is that https://www.pissup.de/package/basic-survival-4/ should redirect to a german equivalent where we have one.

It's strange that it isn't as it has not been more than a week since I uploaded all the redirects. Perhaps this is down to the site: search not providing all results, and perhaps if it's limiting the amount of results, when some are removed, it starts showing others that were not showing before?

[JohnSammon]

Hey Rasmus - I honestly think it's an issue with the redirects. I would double check them.

I did just visit https://www.pissup.de/package/basic-survival-4/ and it looks like it's redirecting. Were you able to get those shored up? If you are still having trouble, I would contact your web host to make sure those are shored up.

[pissuptours]

Yep, this one I fixed just now as you send it.

I think the issue with wrong redirects is mostly me not spotting them all rather than a problem with the ones I already set not redirecting correctly.

I expect there to be thousand + wrong pages, but when I use site:domain.tld and a word in wrong language, for instance "evg" (french word for bachelor party) Google spots only up to 300 (suspiciously the same maximum amount for all sites).