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Google and Orphaned URLs
I had a bunch of links at www.developmentnow.com/nntp/ that Google had indexed, but I wanted Google to instead use the new links at www.developmentnow.com/g/. I was planning on using a 301 Redirect per my earlier post on search engine-friendly ways to change URLs, but it seems like Googlebot has once again gotten it right.
You see, the links at www.developmentnow.com/nntp are old. I don't link to them any more -- I link to the new urls. So the old URLs are orphaned, i.e. without a home or parent. :( Yet I had to keep them up b/c search engines were linking to them.
But it seems that Google figured out that the old /nntp/ links are no good & that it needs to start using the new ones, because over the weekend it started linking to the new URLs.
I'll still use the 301 Redirect, just in case, but the takeaway is: if Google is linking to a bunch of URLs on your site that can't be reached from your homepage, then it may stop linking to those URLs.
You see, the links at www.developmentnow.com/nntp are old. I don't link to them any more -- I link to the new urls. So the old URLs are orphaned, i.e. without a home or parent. :( Yet I had to keep them up b/c search engines were linking to them.
But it seems that Google figured out that the old /nntp/ links are no good & that it needs to start using the new ones, because over the weekend it started linking to the new URLs.
I'll still use the 301 Redirect, just in case, but the takeaway is: if Google is linking to a bunch of URLs on your site that can't be reached from your homepage, then it may stop linking to those URLs.
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