Hi all, I manage a car dealer website and some of my customers have been saying that they see pages of old cars (sold last year!) and some say the website doesn't even load. Does anyone know what this issue could be? I wondered if it is a canonical thing, which i don't totally understand. It is a Wordpress site. Any constructive help would be greatly appreciated. The URL is www.used-cars-peterborough.co.uk Many thanks Paul.
Hi, canonical tags have nothing to do with this! Also for me your site loads quick and correctly - cannot see anything wrong with it...
Hello Paul, we'd need a lot more information about how your website works and what plugins you're using.
It is Ok, so that rules out canonical, good. Is there a way to make Google index the current pages only, so it replaces any previous? I added a new sitemap to my webmaster tools two weeks ago but the issues still remain apparently. It does use any non-standard plugins. In fact, only a couple, akismet, dolly etc.
You can remove particular pages from the index through google webmaster central. It might take more than two weeks, but they should de-index the none existent pages sooner or later. especially after submitting a new sitemap. I do not use wordpress, but still I do not see how your plugins could cause this problem.
The problem is, we dont know what the URLs of the old pages are. It is intermittent aswell. Seems to me like I need a complete refresh of the indexed pages. I guess i will resubmit a new site map again. Thanks for your help.
How do your visitors know that those pages are old car pages when those pages do not exist? Moreover, what is leading your visitors to those old pages? Google?
Hi Psharma, Yes the customers did a Google search. They know it is an old page when they ring up to ask about the car and are told it was sold months ago.
Does it mean that your visitors are frequently landing on very old pages (which still exist, but are not useful) rather than fresh pages? Where is the error then? It simply means that for some reason, your old pages are ranking better in google search results. Solutions: no need to delete those pages, just dont give them SEO weigtage. This can be done by nofollowing all links in your website's internal structure which point to those less useful pages (it will save some more link juice for newer pages then, making them rank even better). Second thing you can do is to create prominent links on old pages linking to one of the newer pages, giving your visitors a close suggestion, and leaking out the link juice to the newer pages. You must also consider a perfect site link architecture which ensures maximum link juice to important pages and minimum to unimportant ones.
When you did off-site seo, how exactly did you go about that? Did you start any seo aiming for those specific listings?