Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Sean Clarke on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/04/2021).

Question about redirects and 410 status codes

Question about redirects and 410 status codes.Lets say we have a product and it gets indexed, then we change the URL and add a 301 redirect to point to the new URL. Then we notice the original URL is listed in Search Console as Excluded because of the redirect. However when we search Google we find the new URL is indexed. Should be change the 301 redirect and replace it with a 410 redirect to tell Google the old URL is gone? Or should we do something else?Thanks for your advice!
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Suresh Kumar G: Leave it as it is...so that if there are any future visitors of old URL get redirects to new url.
  • Sean Clarke: Where would future visitors come from if the old URL is not indexed?
  • Suresh Kumar G: What if the old urls are getting visitors from social networks or forums etc..
  • Sean Clarke: Suresh Kumar G They are not. The only place our URLs have been used is on our site.
  • Suresh Kumar G: Still I won`t remove the redirects...But I`ll make this kind of decisions based on sever logs.It`s your call sean.
  • Sean Clarke: Suresh Kumar G Thanks, Maybe I`ll test with a few URLs and see if it makes any difference.
  • Sean Clarke: Ok I suppose the other question is does it matter if in Search Console you have 7K excluded pages? Wouldn`t it be nicer to have as few excluded pages as possible?
  • Brenda Malone: No, leave the redirects. The Coverage report is there for your information. If the Excluded Pages includes pages that should be in that category, there is no problem.
  • Sean Clarke: Brenda Malone thanks.
  • Ammon Johns: Only the use of a 301 has kept the URLs alive, of course, since otherwise anyone arriving there would, I presume, get a 404. But the thing is, if Google didn`t crawl the URL and record what it got there, how would it know there was a 301? Just because Google have indexed a URL does not directly equate to them ever letting that URL rank for anything (other than a search for that specific URL).If you are not at all worried about keeping any third-party links working, then there`s no need for a 301 at all, and you can safely either serve a deliberate 410, or allow the URL to fail to a 404. And Google will, of course, spider those for a while, and record what they find there. However, if Google do somehow continue to find even one link anywhere in the entire internet to that URL it will continually be re-added to their list of URLs to crawl and index.
  • נתן גאידאי: 301`s work perfectly, just did that with almost 100k pagesCoverage report is just for you to see

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/04/2021).