Webmaster Tools Find

bymissjanice

192 followers

11 years ago

Another Update...............

After doing back end htaccess 301 redirects and then doing "Fetch as Google" a few times in Webmaster tools, this issue is cleared.

...........End Another Update

Update...............

So after looking around, looks like the url removal tool maybe wasn't the right way to fix the issue. So, I'm trying 301 redirects instead.

...........End Update

So, if you're like me, traffic-challenged, you may be wondering if something is up that has Google mad at you. I was watching the Rising From the SERP Dead video to try and figure that out, and the first piece of advice was to visit Webmaster Tools and see if there are any technical errors. Turns out, I did have a technical issue! I had changed the structure of my permalinks after Google had started crawling my site, and normally Google will flush a 404 (not found) page. But Wordpress lets you go to pages via different urls, it will forward www.site.com/category/the-page/ to www.site.com/the-page/. So Google had indexed both the old url and the new url and was saying I had duplicate content on 3 pages thinking 2 versions of each existed because there was no 404.

Here's where I found the error:

And the fix, ask Google to not crawl the old urls.

Now my fingers are crossed hoping it helps!