1 month and links still not removed from google

[brakkar]

Hi,
I moved my site from static to dynamic, and set proper redirection for the most important category pages from my old static site to my dynamic site.

I added in robots.txt instructions to completely disallow some directories from the static site.

Still, after arround a month, the old results from the static site are still polluting google index. It is particularly annoying on adsense site search: I use it so visitors can search my site, and old result keeps polluting the search results.

Are the old results definitely removed on google ranking "dance" updates? I thought google would be much more reactive about robots.txt disallow instructions.

Cordially,
Brakkar

[tedster]

It depends on many things - I've seen old URLs dropped in a few days after a robots.txt change on a site with lots of PR. But it can take a while, most definitey.

Are you 100% certain your redirects are all correct and returning a 301 status code?

[brakkar]

Yes, in fact, the redirected pages are not the problem: the problem are all the pages in robots.txt disalowed directories. They still show up in results, in particular adsense site search results....

I guess I will just have to wait.

[BigDave]

Take them out of your robots.txt for now.

Google cannot find the redirect if you have disallowed the pages. It can only find the ridirect when it trieds to crawl the page.

[g1smd]

It is likely that they will flag those URLs as Supplemental and leave them visible in the index for another year. If that happens then there is little you can do to fix the situation.

Whatever happens, make sure that any visitor clicking those URLs in the SERPs gets served your custom error page that helps them on their way to the correct part of the site.

[Wlauzon]

I have never really figured this out.

Last year we changed a lot of pages on one of our sites. But one page that has been gone for over 9 months still shows up in a search. Just that one page, all the other old pages are long gone.

Maybe some other site has a link to that page, so it keeps it alive? Who knows...

[g1smd]

No, Google likes to keep hold of stuff that you delete, long after you delete it, and then show it in the index for another year.

They do this so that people who found stuff via Google can still find it many weeks or months later even it no longer exists on the real site.