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I have a simple personal webpage which I use to list my publications and link the corresponding PDFs (I work in academia). Until now, this webpage was hosted by my university:

http(s)://myuniversitydomain.example/~myusername

and it was very well ranked on Google (searching for either my name or one of my articles would print my webpage first). My public folder contains (among other things):

  • an index.html file (my personal webpage);
  • a folder documents containing the PDF files which are linked on my webpage.

For some reason I had to move it to another location (on some server hosted by another institution):

https://myusername.domain.example

So I added a .htaccess file at the root of my old public folder, containing the following redirection:

RedirectPermanent /~myusername https://myusername.domain.example

The redirections (for the webpage or the PDF files) work well. Moreover, I checked (using Safari's web inspector) that the university server responded with HTTP 301.

The problem now is that Google did not change the URL in the search results. Using Google Search Console, I realized that the new URL had been excluded because they were considered duplicate. So I added a canonical link to my webpage. I also asked Google to reindex the new URL and the old one.

I am surprised that Google has not figured out yet that the old URLs (of the webpage and the PDF files) should be replaced by the new ones... Am I doing something wrong? How can I ensure that Google will eventually do the replacement and transfer the ranking?

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  • 2
    I expect its just a matter of waiting.
    – davidgo
    Commented Nov 4, 2021 at 19:35
  • "Google did not change the URL in the search results." - For this are you searching using the same organic method as mentioned above: "searching for either my name or one of my articles"? Or using a site: search?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Nov 5, 2021 at 1:05

2 Answers 2

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As long as your 301 redirect is in place properly, it is definitely just a matter of waiting.

The old result will be replaced by the new result, it may just take several weeks. In the mean time, users who click the old search result should be sent to the new URL by the 301 (click on your google search results yourself to double check that this is the case).

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Sometimes never. I had 301 redirects that were seven years old and still the google crawler looked for those old pages. I finally gave up and removed the redirects, returning 404. I think the issue is double redirects; I have one for the moved page and another for http-to-https. Not sure the crawler is smart enough to unwind two status returns.

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  • Google regularly hits old URLs to check whether the redirects are still in place. That process happens independently from the process of updating the URL in search results. If other sites reference the redirected URL, Google may crawl the redirect forever, which is desired behavior. You shouldn't remove old redirects, and you shouldn't "give up" on getting Google to stop crawling old redirects. Also, note that googlebot follows chains of at least 5 redirects.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Commented May 27 at 1:23
  • Keeping the redirects may be good SEO, but the maintenance burden is not worth it to me. Like so many people, I assumed for a long time that 301 meant, "This is the new location; please correct your database." I am not going to make someone else's different interpretation into my problem.
    – skewray
    Commented May 28 at 2:20

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