Google shows wrong URLs for my WordPress site, despite a correct URLs in XML sit

  • I used to have a purely HTML/CSS website, but I recently converted the site to a WordPress self-hosted site. I now have more pages than before, so I use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yeost. The plugin, among other things, creates an XML sitemap for the pages on my site.

    My issue is not actual SEO rankings, but the URL that google displays for some of my pages. The homepage URL is obviously correct and any pages that are new to the WordPress site are also correct in Google. The problem I have is the URLs for pages that existed on the old site. These pages were, for example, 123.com/bob.html, but on the newsite, they are simply 123.com/bob/. Google finds all the metadata/descriptions for the new site’s pages, but the URL that shows up in Google results for these pages still have that .html, leading people nowhere…

    Is there any way to correct the URLs for these pages? I use Webmaster Tools and it says all the URLs in my sitemap (which has all correct URLs) have been indexed, so I don’t know what else to do.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • tigtog

    (@tigtoggmailcom)

    I don’t know about correcting the URLs as spidered by Google, but you should be able to add some rewrite rules to your .htaccess so that requests for those URLs are sent to the new pages instead.

    Thread Starter CLS4690

    (@cls4690)

    No I mean the old links are still in google. If Google indexed all my pages, why would it still have the old URLs for the old website pages, even though it has new meta info…and any new page shows up with the correct URL…

    Hi,

    How Google can know that you no longer want those old page to be indexed? That sitemap is only used for new URL discovery, not to remove unexisting URLS.

    There probably still some external links to those old URL and Google still tries to index then. If they return the “404 Page not Found” errors, they will be eventually removed from index. Not immediately though (what if you temporarily removed them?).

    You can expedite the removal process though:
    1. Create 301 redirects from old URL to new URLs. So that Google knows that the pages have permanently moved to new URL and at the same time all external URL will still work correctly.
    https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

    2. If you don’t care about external URL and the “link juice” they pass to your site, you can simple use the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools
    https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

    Thread Starter CLS4690

    (@cls4690)

    So you’re saying I can request those links to be removed from google, and then, say, resubmit my sitemap and have google recrawl? Would that work? I have a pretty good crawl rate, I think.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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