"Some important page has been removed by request"

[lucy24]

:: moderators, can we quietly ignore the part about "professional webmasters"? Just multiply all issues by a couple orders of magnitude and they can apply to grownups too ::

When I finally got into GWT (different thread) I found this across the top of the Dashboard in impossible-to-miss colors:

Some important page has been removed by request. More Details

"Some important page" (those are the actual words, not a camouflaged title) link to the page they're talking about-- that is, to its previous URL, now redirected. "More Details" links to the URL Removal page at GWT.

Did I goof?

Background: In a fit of temporary sanity I decided it made no sense to have my two strongest original* pages in completely unrelated directories surrounded by completely unrelated material. ("Strongest" means they both have respectable CTRs coming out of search queries that may really be answered by the pages. "Original" means stuff I wrote myself on a subject I ::cough, cough:: actually know a bit about.) So I packed up the both of 'em, along with a javascript file and two more files on the same theme-- one of them from yet another subdirectory-- regularized the format and shoved them into a new top-level directory, and finally chopped one of the original two in half. Not the one g### is now fussing about.

And then added a bunch of stuff to htaccess for the sole benefit of robots trying to crawl the old URL.

Finally I yanked all the old URLs from google's index so they would stop messing with it and proceed directly to the new version, which is linked from everywhere on the site. This did not prevent them from coming out with a fistful of "Duplicate title tags" from the newly redirected before-and-after URLs, and a pair of "Duplicate meta descriptions"-- for the very page they are complaining about.

Is this your basic Damned if you do, damned if you don't? Should I put everything back and let g### sort it out?


* As distinct from the perennially popular etext of Perez the Mouse, which is obviously not original. Well, except for the malformed drop caps. I'll fix them one of these years.

[g1smd]

They'll figute it out eventually. If there is no duplicate, you can ignore the message.

I would not have gone for URL removal though. I would have let the old URLs sit in the SERPs and have a 301 on the site so that anyone clicking the link would be redirected to the new page.

Without the 301, visitors would simply see an error message (404) when they click the link.

By removing the URLs from the SERPs there are no visitors.

With a 301 in place, Google would have added the new URL to the SERPs and at some point removed the old one. If you're lucky, the new URL might have ranked almost as highly.

[lucy24]

OK. Duly reincluded. File under "What was I thinking?"

301 Redirects were in place all along. And then there's the revised redirect for an image whose name I changed after moving it-- and, unfortunately, after g### crawled it once with the old name in the new location, meaning that I now have to put both versions in the redirect. Sigh. /(hovercraft|fonts)/images/ et cetera.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

[g1smd]

Just make sure that requesting the oldest version of the URL doesn't invoke a double redirect and you're good to go.

[lucy24]

Yes, I shovel them into the same redirect whenever it's humanly possible to do so. F'rinstance g### is still periodically crawling /hovercraft/FontInput months after it became /hovercraft/font_input (sit on your hands, if you must). Now that it has become /fonts/font_input, the redirect says /hovercraft/(font_input|FontInput)

The only area where redirects really are a horrendous mess is the /paintings/ directory, which I turned inside-out and sideways last winter and didn't give a thought to robots until long after I'd forgotten what most of the files used to be called. But that's just fluff so it doesn't matter. It's got its very own 404 page just for humans.

Wonder how google decides what's an important page? In this case, the computer seems to have shown near-human intelligence.

[g1smd]

until long after I'd forgotten what most of the files used to be called

Server access logs, webmastertools reports and analytics reports will reveal most of the missing information.

However, if more than 6 months has elapsed it's only worth bothering with redirecting old URLs if they have some incoming external links.