Are redirects currently broken in search console?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In mid August I 301 redirected a page to a new URL (merged 2 pages), call them Page A(removed) and page B(merged and improved).

A week later search console indicated that it had found and indexed the new page but was still indexing the removed page and sending traffic to that. I insected Page A and the result said it was indexable, which it's not, and it listed the canonical as Page B. I submitted it for "request indexing" thinking Google would consider it moved via 301 and would favor Page B in serps.

That never happened and as of this morning all of the impressions and clicks from search are being credited to Page A and Page B keeps getting 1 impression per day, and only one. Page A has been re-crawled at least twice according to the sitemap data in search console.

Has Google changed the search behavior around 301 redirects? Is it a bug? I can't think of any reason Google would continue to send traffic to a deprecated URL with 301 in place. Google is aware I want Page B to rank and Page A to be removed from SERPs, they are crediting Page B as the canonical for Page A.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Now I'm thinking that "request indexing" was not a good thing to do. In my mind it means "check this page out again, it's changed" but as the button says I requested a page be indexed that has a 301 to the actual page I want indexed. Removal doesn't seem like a good option either.

It's been a month and search is still sending traffic to a page that redirects....

[not2easy]

Does "page A" have a meta robots tag that needs to be updated? If you use a sitemap, was page A removed? I agree that verifying the URL might not have helped. What do your logs show when you access page A?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Page A was deleted, it is no longer accessible online. All links that pointed to it now point to page B. Page A was removed from the sitemap. The htaccess file redirects traffic to Page B via 301 from the top of the file ahead of any non-http to http redirects or other processing... I've quadruple checked the setup, it's fine.

Yet Google search console says page A is accessible, albeit with the canonical chosen belonging to page B. Google search has been sending traffic to Page A regardless since mid August.

I just checked - SERP page title and linked URL belongs to page A but the cache is of page B? Flux like this is expected but for a day or two, I've never seen it last over a month.

My server logs show several crawls to both pages, with the proper responses (301 Page A, 200 Page B). Traffic from Google is 100% to page A, traffic from Bing is 100% to page B.

Foo

[not2easy]

Ordinarily that would have self healed by this time. I have no guesses left.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I can remove the redirect and serve Google a helping of 404 until they stop favoring that URL... but that wouldn't help actual traffic. I've never seen it take over a month to fully migrate a 301 before.

Back to back to back major updates while making major changes to search console might have had something to do with it.

[not2easy]

Or you could put back the Page B with a note to disappear it:

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="unavailable_after: 28 Sep 2022 15:00:00 UTC"> 

and keep the 301 to Page A.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The 301 went to Page B, but right now I'm thinking search console is a little untrustworthy as they work through their console upgrades and multiple core updates at the same time.

It can wait.