Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Old deleted sitemap still shown in webmaster tools
-
Hello
I have redisgned a website inl new url structure in cms.
Old sitemap was not set to 404 but changed with new sitemap files,also new sitemap was named different to old one.All redirections done properly
Still 3 month after google still shows me duplicate titile and metas by comparing old and new urls
I am lost in what to do now to eliminate the shown error. How can google show urls that are not shown in sitemap any more?
Looking forward to any help
Michelles
-
Hi Michelle,
So you're 404'ing the old sitemap URL yet you've placed the new sitemap at the same location...? If you want to private message me your domain, I'd be happy to take a look for you.
There should be no need to 404 anything, just replace the old sitemap and Google will do the rest. Alternatively, just recreate the new sitemap index at a new location such as domain.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml.
Thanks
-
Is the problem that you have old URL's still indexed in Google or that Google Webmaster Tools is just displaying / accessing your old sitemap?
- Delete your old sitemap from the server.
- Delete your old sitemap from Webmaster Tools.
- Submit your new sitemap to Webmaster Tools.
- Ping your sitemap to Google here.
- Check your web analytics to see what old URL's are still being accessed.
- If the old URL's still won't leave Google's index you can either block them with robots.txt, request a index removal request within Webmaster Tools.
- You can also add your new sitemap to your robots.txt so search engines know where they should be looking.
Let me know if none of the above answers your question.
-
that's a known issue - Google Webmaster Tools is very slow in de-indexing old sitemaps, even if they are removed from GWT. I have the same issue with some sites and it's pretty annoying because it makes it harder to discover the real 404s.
also refer to this helpful article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
Is there a way to get a list of Total Indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools?
I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up. I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove. Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sparrowdog0 -
Sitemap on a Subdomain
Hi, For various reasons I placed my sitemaps on a subdomain where I keep images and other large files (static.example.com). I then submitted this to Google as a separate site in Webmaster tools. Is this a problem? All of the URLs are for the actual site (www.example.com), the only issue on my end is not being able to look at it all at the same time. But I'm wondering if this would cause any problems on Google's end.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | enotes0 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index
We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lakshdeep0 -
What should be done with old news articles?
Hello, We have a portal website that gives information about the industry we work in. This website includes various articles, tips, info, reviews and more about the industry.We also have a news section that was previously indexed in Google news but is not for the past few month.The site was hit by Panda over a year ago and one of the things we have been thinking of doing is removing pages that are irrelavant/do not provide added value to the site.Some of these pages are old news articles posted over 3-4 years ago and that have had hardly any traffic to.All the news articles on the site are under a /archive/ folder sorted by month and year, so for example a url for a news item from April 2010 would be /archive/042010/article-nameMy question is do you think removing such news articles would benefit the site helping it get out of Panda (many other things have been done in the site as well), if not what is the best suggested way to keep these articles on the site in a way which Google indexes them and treats them well.thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Old Redirecting Website Still Showing In SERPs
I have a client, a plumber, who bought another plumbing company (and that company's domain) at one point. This other company was very old and has a lot of name recognition so they created a dedicated page to this other company within their main website, and redirected the other company's old domain to that page. This has worked fine, in that this page on the main site is now #1 when you search for the other old company's name. But for some reason the old domain comes up #2 (despite the fact that it's redirecting). Now, I could understand if the redirect had only been set up recently, but I'm reasonably sure this happened about a year ago. Could it be due to the fact that there are many sites out there still linking to that old domain? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VTDesignWorks1 -
Online Sitemap Generator
I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0