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I had previously submitted my websites sitemap to google search console. It submitted all my pages and indexed most of them. However, recently I have changed most of my pages URLs due to SEO. Since I changed most of the URLs, I thought it might have helped to go back into Google search console and resubmit my sitemap and I did. Is there anything I can / should do so that Google knows I only changed the URL of my pages?

I typed into Google "site:mywebsite.com" and most of my pages are indexed and I see them but they have the old URL from when I submitted my sitemap and once you click on one of the pages, of course, the page can not be found because I changed the URL. Also, I'm not using the old URL anymore, I kept the same page but just changed the URL.

Thank you

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  • Search engines are not real-time or anywhere close. It will take time, weeks or months, before your new pages are discovered. The best thing you can do is be patient. Hard to do - granted. We have all been in your shoes. Just monitor to make sure nothing is going wrong and you did your work okay and leave the rest to the search engine.
    – closetnoc
    Jun 14 '16 at 0:44
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    Also, it will be helpful, if you can 301 redirect the old URLs to new URLs.
    – Aakash
    Jun 14 '16 at 7:50
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Add 301 redirects from your old URLs to your new ones. (and google's index will update itself)

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Follow this process step by step.

1] Make list of all the pages that you have changed recently. Submit this pages in the webmaster tool for removal from Google search.

Login Webmaster > Google Index > Remove URLs > Temporarily hide > Submit all the urls one by one.

2] Add 301 redirect to all the pages.

Once done wait for the day to see the result. First step will remove all your pages from Google search and 301 redirect will tell google to move the authority of existing pages to new pages.

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  • Why would you use the Remove URLs Tool? Setting 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs will work both user & spider traffic.
    – Andrew Lott
    Jun 18 '16 at 15:38
  • Yes agreed on that, but if you want to remove them instantly then removal tool will remove the pages from Google search. It is the quickest way to remove the pages from Google.
    – Prashant Gorule
    Jun 20 '16 at 15:27
  • Based on OP's question I don't think removing old URLs is helpful.
    – Andrew Lott
    Jun 20 '16 at 18:39
  • @Nick has mentioned in question that he is not using old pages now. When someone clicks on the old page they get error message. so it is better to remove them from the search engine also.
    – Prashant Gorule
    Jun 21 '16 at 13:47
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    Nope, he's "not using the old URL anymore... kept the same page but just changed the URL." So it's far better to redirect to the new URL for the same page/content.
    – Andrew Lott
    Jun 21 '16 at 17:55

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