301 redirected an entire website 4.5 months ago; still showing up in Google search results?

301 redirected an entire website 4.5 months ago; still showing up in Google search results? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search-console, redirects, google-search to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about 301 redirected an entire website 4.5 months ago; still showing up in Google search results?.Problem :

Consolidated two websites on December 9, 2013; a site wide page-to-page 301 redirect was implemented which redirects site A to site B

Website A (the one being redirected) is:

• Still showing up in Google search results (the link properly 301 redirects to the new site)


• Still showing up in our site B Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) site links report as a top source of inbound links

I don't know how to "jog" Google into recognizing that this site is gone; we do still have site B

Thoughts:

• Site A still has a GWT entry, deleting this might help


• We could turn off the redirects...

Any other suggestions/answers?

Updates:

I disabled the redirects, used the Change of Address tool and then reactivated the 301s

The index for the nonexistent site is continuing to drop at a pretty steady pace (no indication that the Change of Address tool helped or hindered)

Now if only I could get them to remove mention of the "links" from the nonexistent site to the main site in the main site's "Links to your site" report

Considering disabling the redirects and allowing the old site to be truly "gone"

Solution :

Create a sitemap for the old website and submit it to Google.

In that way the GoogleBot is forced to visit the content of your site and update the index accordingly.

It will then find your 301s or your 404s and remove them in due course of time.

Using change address in Google webmasters should reflect this. Also have you submitted the new sitemap
XML from the new domain. Lastly I would try doing a Fetch as Google from the new domain. Full details present here
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en

Google states the following with regard to redirects:

If you do a site: search for a page that is redirected, you'll see the redirected URL in the results. This is normal. For example, say that www.example.com has been redirected to www.redirectedexample.com. Doing a search for site:www.example.com will return results from www.redirectedexample.com. Redirects like this don't affect your page rankings.

See in full at:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35256

However, I've had 301 redirects set up for one of my sites when I moved and re-branded it. I was moving because I didn't think I could use AdSense on my site with it on an OpenShift free web hosting service. Research told me that since I was a subdomain of rhcloud.com, I was affected by anyone that had hosted "bad" sites under that domain. I researched this when I tried to sign up and got no response to the AdSense registration. The subdomain also prevented me from using the "Change of address" tool that Google provides as you aren't allowed to use that tool to move from a subdomain to a non-subdomain.

Anyway, to check your 301 redirects, there are websites that will do this for you for free. You should double check that your 301s are set up correctly. Here is one I used to verify mine were working:

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

I would say it worked well, but when I put 'site:myoldsubdomain.rhcloud.com' into Google and Google still shows the old subdomain almost two months later, I'm not sure what to think.

Regards,
Jagger

In your case, the 301 redirects are keeping the original domain alive as far a Google is concerned. If you want it to be dropped from the index, then you have to remove the 301 redirects.

If the issue about seo, google-search-console, redirects, google-search is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.