: Duplicate content from a website still indexed by Google My client used a third-party company that used duplicate link exchanges on their website previously. When my client gave their website
My client used a third-party company that used duplicate link exchanges on their website previously.
When my client gave their website to me to maintain it, I developed a different website that doesn't use link exchanges, and actually doesn't contain any duplicate content.
Although the website has changed, the duplicate content is still indexed by search engines. I checked this with Google using:
site:www.example.com
and the results were:
example.com www.example.com/links_1 example.com/links_2 www.example.com/links_3
...until page 5 on Google, and with same meta description and meta title. It's very bad because when I search for example (the name of website, not using a keyword), not one of the results is example.com.
I think the source of the problem is that Google still has the duplicate content indexed used by the website previously. Is there any method/way to delete this, or get Google to index the new site?
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Are you sure accessing those removed links returns a 404 status?
Search engines should be smart enough to get the message...
Did you published an updated sitemap?
That's a long shoot but if one has been submitted with a changefreq value of "never" for some pages, it may take some time before Google try to reindex them.
If we're not talking about thousands of pages, I would recommend you recreate them so they return a permanent redirection code.
In the short term, that will allow people using Google to actually find your content, and it will definitely help search engines to update their data.
I would also resubmit a sitemap and ensure the canonical URL is embedded in those pages.
To remove content from Google you should use robots.txt or a noindex meta tag in the old site.
To redirect pages from the old site to the new site you should use a 301 redirect.
If you use the robots.txt or the noindex tag solutions, the changes will not be immediate. However if you use a redirect the user will be immediately redirected to the new site.
If the domain of the new site is the same you can still remove content from Google index by carefully building a specific robots.txt file that only removes the content you don't want.
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