Old pages still found through search engins

  • Hi!

    A client contacted me to update his WordPress site. I installed a new theme and devved accordingly. For ease, we changed the permalinks on the new theme so that the url reflects the page name. I know it’s not ideal… Anyway, when searching for his company on search engines, pages from his old site still appear in the results. I didn’t think these pages existed anymore, but apparently they’re being housed somewhere, possibly in the database? For example, we have https://www.mysite.com/contact-us/ and https://www.mysite.com/our-staff on the current site and current theme, but https://www.mysite.com/contact.php and https://www.mysite.com/staff.php of the old theme still show as results from search engines. The content and copy aren’t even the same. Any way I can delete or unpublish these old pages? Or is there some other way to mitigate this? Thank you very much!

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  • They have to be somewhere in the hosting account. The engines are finding them somewhere.

    Using an FTP program go through the folders in the hosting account. If you find a folder containing the old files and you still want to keep them on the server, put a robots.txt file in that folder that disallows engines from indexing that folder.

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