Google Still Indexing 301 Content In SERPs?

[Planet13]

Google still seems to index content (at least the original URL) from pages that have been redirect via 301. Is this new? or am I doing something wrong with my 301 redirects.

If I do a search in google with the site operator and with a keyword that has been removed, such as this:

site:original_domain.com blue widgets

It will return the LINK for:

original_domain.com/blue-widgets.html

BUT it will show the Title and the description and even the author data for the NEW location of the site.

If I click the link in the google serps, it will take me to the new site.

If I view the cached, it will show me the NEW site.

If I check the original page with a tool to view http headers, it will show that it is a 301 redirect.

Is this common practice? The pages were moved and the 301 redirects were implemented around four years ago (maybe longer).


Thanks in advance.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:37 pm (utc) on Jul 18, 2014]
[edit reason] removed unintended smiley [/edit]

[JD_Toims]

It's relatively new -- Google now decides which URL they want to show people, the redirected URL or the destination URL and sometimes they choose the redirected URL for some reason(s) that give me a bit of a head-scratch.

[Planet13]

@ JD_Tomis:

Thanks for the input.

"the redirected URL or the destination URL and sometimes they choose the redirected URL for some reason(s) that give me a bit of a head-scratch. "

Well, it would be helpful if at least they DIDN'T append the NEW site name in the title.

so as it appears, it is:

Title: New Page Name | [New Domain name Appended by Google]
Link: Old site link

How the heck is that useful to people?

[JD_Toims]

How the heck is that useful to people?

I have no clue -- I also have no clue why they would want to mislead people and imply they're going land on example.com/page by using it in the results when they know very well the person is going to land on elpmaxe.com/other-page instead.

[not2easy]

How the heck is that useful to people?

Or they don't know they aren't where they thought they were.

Read a very complete and clear explanation (Thanks, lucy24) that might help you see what's happening: [webmasterworld.com...] (first response) and you can figure out where the plan isn't going as planned and why they have this confusion.

[JD_Toims]

Lucy24 is talking about rewriting/redirecting within a single domain to create friendly URLs. The rewrite/redirect process she's talking about is a bit different than an old domain that's redirected to a page on new domain.

What's going on in the SERPs is Google is ignoring protocol and showing the redirected URL [original] in the SERPs rather than referencing the destination URL [new URL served in the Location header for the original URL] as they should according to RFC 2616.

Emphasis Added

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

[w3.org...]

ADDED

What we're talking about would be like Google showing http://www.example.com/index.php?var=val&stuff=things in the SERPs even though there's a 301 from there to http://www.example.com/val/things which is where people will visit to view the information present on http://www.example.com/index.php?var=val&stuff=things via internal rewrite.

Basically, Google is ignoring protocol and not showing visitors the fact URLs are 301 redirected to another location in some cases.

[Planet13]

Maybe my redirects are WRONG then?

This is what I have in my .htaccess file for my_oldd_omain.com

~~~~

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^old_page_name.html$ http://www.my_new_domain/new_page_name.html [R=301,L]

~~~~

Am I missing a line?

My site is on an apache server:

[JD_Toims]

Am I missing a line?

Nope, that's exactly the way it should be done, with the exception of \ (escaping) the . (dot) on the left side of the rule -- Note: The . (dot) not being "escaped" will not cause the issue. Escaping checks for a literal . (dot) rather than "any character except the end of a line".

RewriteRule ^old_page_name\.html$ http://www.my_new_domain/new_page_name.html [R=301,L]

That's the only adjustment and again, it won't cause the issue.

You might double check with the server header check in the free tools [freetools.webmasterworld.com...] to make 100% sure it's not being preceded by something else causing a 302, but chances are if a browser is redirected to the correct location and the preceding is the rule, then it's just a "Google Thing" and nothing you can fix.

[Planet13]

@ JD_Toims

Thanks for the code tip. Will try and change it today.