why my htaccess redirects not respected by Google?

[the_soc]

Has anyone had the experience in the last few months that out of date pages that you 301 redirected via htaccess (in order to avoid their appearance in google results) are actually appearing - and not redirecting? I've got scores of old obsolete pages showing up in results and can see the content which a visitor is not supposed to access anymore...

[thebookiesoffers]

Has anyone had the experience in the last few months that out of date pages that you 301 redirected via htaccess (in order to avoid their appearance in google results) are actually appearing - and not redirecting? I've got scores of old obsolete pages showing up in results and can see the content which a visitor is not supposed to access anymore...

im no expert in this but when were they cached? maybe you had a server issue a while back? or is the redirect got any problems in it

[the_soc]

I don't think it's cache-related - the site is "hand made", not CMS (eg. wordpress). The problem came almost overnight, after a few years where the 301 redirects were respected I'm suddenly seeing materials that aren't supposed to show up in searches at all - pages last updated 5-6 years ago etc.

[thebookiesoffers]

I don't think it's cache-related - the site is "hand made", not CMS (eg. wordpress). The problem came almost overnight, after a few years where the 301 redirects were respected I'm suddenly seeing materials that aren't supposed to show up in searches at all - pages last updated 5-6 years ago etc.

I'd check in webmaster tools then to see if an error is mentioned and also check the actual redirect, might be worth speaking with your hosts as well to see if there is/was a problem. sorry i can't offer anymore help

[the_soc]

Thanks for the suggestion about the host - they may know something I haven't been able to find with the internet searches...

[lots0]

Google has been indexing these 301 re-directs all along, they just never showed them before in the SERP.. But that has changed.

You now need to "no-index", the redirected pages (added/// Also, just to be safe, you might want to "no-follow" the links as well). If you don't want to google to display them....

a real F'n PITA in a large static site.

[the_soc]

!! Thank you lots0! Big mystery solved...

[lots0]

Hey NP, I had the same thing happen to a couple of sites. It was a shock to see those old redirect pages in the SERP.

FYI - If you want those pages gone from the SERP fast, once you have added the no_index to the pages, you can go to google WMT and ask for the pages to be removed from the SERP. It is usually fairly fast, a few days and the pages disappear from the SERP.