Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL

[Theo-NL]

Hi there,

While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this.

The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created.

Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).

[DirkC]

Hi Theo,

We encountered something similar when we migrated a site. We properly redirected all the old url's to the new one, however, in the weeks after the migration, we saw a huge increase of 404 in the webmastertools.

When we took a closer look to these url's, we noticed that these where using an url structure we had abandoned several years ago. On the "old" site, these were redirected, but we didn't implement these old redirections after migration as we assumed that these very old url's wouldn't be in the index anymore. We proved wrong. We could delete them manually from the index using webmaster tools, because they used folders we are not using any longer, this is not probably not possible in your case.

While it is a bit annoying, I don't think that having these "phantom" url's in the index is doing you any harm in terms of SEO. They will probably never pop-up for normal search queries, only when you do in-depth queries, limiting the results to only your site.

rgds,

Dirk

[RyanPurkey]

A few days plus ~100,000 decade's old pages in Google is usuallynot enough time to see a change. You can spot check the 301s and run a fetch / render from GWT to see if the changes should be working though. Other than that, you'll probably have to wait a bit longer.