Google's 'Remove URL Tool' - will the 301 still forward link juice?

[Jez123]

I asked in another thread about removing unwanted URL's. Due to a server error, some of my old redirected pages go re listed (the server rebooted and somehow managed to load my site as it was back in February without redirects in the .htaccess, google crawled it and now I have all sorts of problems). The old url's are causing havoc and I want to remove them. Google suggests using the remove URL tool but I need to know, if I remove the URL's manually, will the 301 that is in place still redirect the old link juice to the new?

I am wondering as it's all such a mess. Originally when I relaunched the site (I switched to wordpress) google see's the 301 and doesn't have a problem and then suddenly, these "moved permanently" files are back, mostly with duplicate content to the current, wanted URL's and now I am trying to "move them permanently" once again. I can see that google would probably not look favourably on this.

So to summarise, will google honor the redirected juice to the new site after redirecting again and should I manually remove the unwanted URL's or will that mean a definite no to redirecting the juice?

[aakk9999]

You should just re-instate your redirects and once Google re-request old URLs, it will see 301, drop old URLs from the index and transfer link juice to redirect target pages. This may take some time depending on how often Google crawls your site.

It is also a good idea to set up canonical link element on pages. Whilst the canonical would not normally be seen (because of 301 redirect) it is a fall-back for exactly these situations when something happens that causes redirects set up in .htaccess not to work.

[Jez123]

@ aakk9999 that's all done now. Google is being very slow to drop the pages again though. You would not recommend the URL removal tool?

The site is getting crawled quite often due to all the changes that are being made but either is not re crawling the old files or is just being very slow to actually drop them.

[aakk9999]

It is quite normal that this would take some time because if these "old urls" are not linked from anywhere any more, then I would guess it would not be a priority for Google to request them any time soon hence it would take longer for Google to drop them from the index.

There are some suggestions to temporary include these "old" URLs that are now redirecting in sitemap.xml and ping Google with the new sitemap and in that way try to influence Google to crawl these URLs sooner in order to see redirect implemented, but I have personally not used this solution (I would normally just wait it out).

If you do include these into sitemap.xml then you would need to remove them once Google re-crawled them as sitemap.xml should only contain valid URLs.

As for Google URL Removal Tool, I have not tried to use it to remove redirected pages from Google index so I cannot comment on this other than Google does not recommend using it in this way.

[Jez123]

The problem is that the old URL's do have links and are also aged. The old links are outranking the new in some cases but also seem to be causing duplicate content issues and all rankings are down. I am wondering if these pages along with other errors have caused me to get caught up with Panda and penalised (or whatever google call it now). The sooner I can get rid of them the better I think.

I am loathe to try the remove tool as well for this but I have already put up a sitemap listing the "bad url's" but google is reluctant to crawl it and drop the old pages. I put that up 2 + weeks ago. Googe seems to be crawling the site often as there have been lots of recent changes but it's staying away from the ones I want it to look at.

[g1smd]

Do not use the removal tool. If you remove the old visible URLs now, you will lose traffic.

While the old URLs show in the SERPs and while they are linked to by other sites, they will bring traffic. The on-site redirect gets the visitor to the right page.

Google will take 3 months or more to reindex the old and new URLs and work out what is going on. This is not a problem.

Your sitemap should list only "good" URLs. Do not list URLs that redirect in your sitemap.

Set the redirect up and wait three months to see what happens.