Best way to fix wrong URLs that Google has indexed?

[alexod]

Hello,

For some reason (my fault) google indexed 30 wrong urls from my website and right now there are this 30 wrong URLs in his index

domain.com/1/
domain.com/2/
domainscom/3/

What is the best option to
1. setup 301 redirects to right pages (e.g. domains.com/1/ to domain.com/category/1/)
2. don't change anything and leave google to pickup 404 pages to understand which one is right url
3. Remove this page via Google page revomal tool ?

-
Thanks

[bwnbwn]

I assume the pages right now are 404's?

number 1 for sure it will take some time for the urls to go away and or once you have the 301 in place and checked then you can do number 3

[alexod]

Yes. right now i have 404 response

[not2easy]

Are these static pages or something like WP? I ask because it looks like the result of a change in permalink structure.

[keyplyr]

Are they indexed or just showing in GSC as errors? Either way they should correct themselves. Adding a disallow for them in robots.txt should speed up the process.

[alexod]

it's WP
yes you are right - it's change in permalink structure issue.
Yes, they are indexed and also in GSC as errors.

>>>Adding a disallow for them in robots.txt should speed up the process.
There is no way (or too many directions) to add disallow in robots.txt:
1) 404 response + time or
2) remove files via GSC + 404
3) 301 redirection

BTW, is remove URL option safe for such case ?

[phranque]

Any idea where Google discovered those urls?

[alexod]

Sitemap/wrong permalink structure- AS i told it's my fault and the worst thing that all those wrong URL's had canonical tags (with wrong urls).

[alexod]

So the right url was - domain.com/silo/page/ with canonical page "domain.com/silo/page/". For a 1 week permalink structure was changed and URL was "domain.com/page/" with canonical page "domain.com/page/". It was enough for Google to index those new ulrs :-(

[not2easy]

For WP redirects you might be better off using a plugin for internal 301's. To quote martinbuster:

Redirection is a very good WP plugin for managing redirects.

That would let you deal with the 404s and drop the old indexed URLs.

[phranque]

i would do 301s in your case.
it is the clearest signal you can send.

if you have a relatively few number of "/silos/"s it would be trivial to redirect these with a mod_rewrite ruleset,
otherwise i would look at a WP plugin solution.

[NickMNS]

Have these pages actually existed as real pages for any significant amount of time? Are there any links pointing to these pages? Is there any traffic landing on these pages? If yes I would agree with phranque, otherwise just 404 the pages.

[phranque]

NickMNS, in my opinion the sitemap and link rel canonical both referring to noncanonical urls are a good enough reason to implement a 301 in this case.

[alexod]

>>>Have these pages actually existed as real pages for any significant amount of time?
1 week

>> Are there any links pointing to these pages?
Yes. from other such pages Next and Previous links

>>Is there any traffic landing on these pages?
Not too much, but google send 40 visitors/day to this pages in total.

>>>"/silos/"s it would be trivial to redirect these with a mod_rewrite ruleset,
hmm ... to be honest all this pages have different category/silo in their urls, so setup redirects (i prefer 301 redirect in htaccess file for each url) will be best option.

thanks

[not2easy]

The reason I suggested a WP plugin is because for every page or post in WP, there are several taxonomies created. You create one page, WP serves 5 or more different URLs with the same content. This is great for content management, but you only want one version indexed. Rules in htaccess are great for pages and directories that exist but it does nothing to alter the taxonomy in WordPress it would only redirect an external request.