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I had my domain set to a parking page with my registrar. The nameservers have been changed (I'm using Azure DNS), I've updated robots.txt and submitted a sitemap. I've requested Google to crawl my site, and we're now showing in Google's search results.

The problem is that for every title link that shows in the search results, some info from the parking page is tacked on to the end.

So the result link might say About Us | Example Company - example.com - nameOfRegistrar.

About Us | Example Company is correct, but - example.com - nameOfRegistrar seems to be old info from the parking page.

The URLs and text descriptions are fine, it's just the title links that are messed up because they add the URL of the site again and the name of the registrar. I think this info was in the title on the parking page.

How do I get rid of this old (presumably cached) info? Do I need to contact Google? My registrar? Shall I ask for another crawl? Why is this happening?

nmit026
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2 Answers2

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So the result link might say "About Us | Example Company - example.com - nameOfRegistrar". "About Us | Example Company" is correct, but "- example.com - nameOfRegistrar" seems to be old info from the parking page. The URLs and text descriptions are fine, it's just the title links that are messed up because they add the URL of the site again and the name of the registrar.

It's better to write a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. Go through this and this to understand how it works and implement it. It should fix your old url bugs in no time.

With the 301 redirects you will be writing instruction at your server level which will enable to redirect it to a page with the url that you mention. So even if your search result point to an old url (until Google fixes it), when your server gets a request pointing to the old url, it would redirect it to the new url that you mention in the .htaccess file. Also, in your robots.txt please make sure you allow bots to crawl .htaccess file too. It would be easy for the bots to know that you have moved urls to newer ones.

Also, if you want to remove old url which are not present in your site currently, then you can place a request to Google to remove them using this Google Help Answer. Not to mention, it might takes days together for those links to disappear.

Hari Harker
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    I'm using ASP.NET MVC, so redirects go in the Web.config file. I did set up 301 redirects to my canonical version, which is https and uses www, from the other 3 possibilities. Anyway, I fixed this by asking google to recrawl the entire site and individual pages. Took about a week. – nmit026 Aug 26 '17 at 22:37
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I fixed this by using Google Search Console. I requested a recrawling of the entire site several times, but after a 5 or 6 days nothing had improved although the site was clearly being slowly crawled. I then requested crawling of individual pages, without crawling other links on that page, for every messed-up result that showed up in Google. That was yesterday and everything seems to be fine now, those pages are showing up fine in Google.

So Google will eventually recrawl your whole site, it just takes time. You can probably speed up the fixing of messed-up results for individual pages by submitting individual pages to be crawled (without requested crawling of other links on that page).

I'm surprised that the crawling process isn't faster, but it's good because it doesn't hit my resources too hard.

As for why it happened, I'm not sure, but I suspect that the DNS info didn't have time to propagate. It doesn't matter now.

nmit026
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