Hi, I have done several 301's, e.g. domain.com/yadayada 301 to -> domain.com/yidiyidi. The things is... The old pages with a 301 redirect are not removed from the index. I.E. yadayada has not been removed and yidiyidi has been added to the index... And about one particular page I recently 301'd ... it's not even in the top 700 for the phrase that it's supposed to rank for, while the old page is ranked #14. (I suspect this is because the old page is not removed from the index, and Google therefore sees the new page as duplicate content). This isn't normal behavior right? I mean aren't pages with a 301 supposed to be removed from the index? How long does this usually take? I checked my headers with a header checker and the 301s are working correctly. Can anybody tell what's going on here and how I can fix this?
No-one have any insight into this? Should I just make the old pages 404 now that the new pages are indexed? (The old pages don't have any backlinks or PR, they're only 2 weeks old). Or would it be best to keep the 301 in place? In other words, will Google eventually recognize that 301 and remove the old redirecting URL from the index?
it will be automatically removed by google when the next time google update its data base.no need to worry about any thing.
But why does it update the index with the newly crawled pages but not remove the pages that are gone then? Does it take longer to remove pages for Google then to index new ones?
This is completely normal behavior.... 301 redirect your old page to new page but not remove from the index. Because of backlink pointing to your page it will appear in the search results. You manually have to remove your old pages from Google's index using Google removal tool. As soon you remove the pages, you will loose all the credit for backlinks.