Does Google ever forget a webpage?

[Glass]

About 13 years ago I made a website for my company. There was only five pages and one of them was a page which I posted pictures of my work, the URL was /gallery.php

A couple years later I built a new website without a gallery page so I did a 301 redirect of that gallery page to a different page.

I then built a new site years after that, and did a 301 redirect of that page to the newer page.

And then I had a new site built after that, and again redirected the old page to the new one.

Now today I had a new site built and I’m looking into things. In Search Console I see that Google attempted to index /gallery.php on September 14, only six days ago. It’s listed under the pages that are not indexed and the reason is because it is a page with a redirect. So fine, that works out.

My question is why is Google still trying to index this page that has been gone for over a decade? I used this one page as an example, but it’s like this for just about all of them.

I’d like to clean up this massive amount of 301 redirects that I already have when making them for the new website. But I guess I have to include even the really old ones if Google is still trying to index them…?

 

[fisicx]

That feels like a very complicated set of redirects. Every time you build a new site you really need to keep the old structure. Google has already indexed and ranked the pages and links point to those pages so don't keep messing with things.

But to answer your question, it's probably because somewhere out there in webland is a website that links to your gallery.php. Google follows links and expects to see that page in place.

 

[Glass]

I’m getting nearly 50 404 errors in Google Search Console. They are pages that never existed, for some reason Google put together weird combinations of directories and webpages. For example it will have a service page but in a directory for a location page. None of that has ever existed and there’s nothing pointing to it today (or ever).

My question is whether this matters. Will those 404 errors hurt me in rankings? Do I have to set up redirect for all of them? I worry about having way too many redirect slowing things down.

 

[Conor Treacy]

If you're seeing URLs for pages that never existed, it could be someone else spoofing Google's crawl or someone who created links to then push it on the web. Take one of the URLs, put it into Google Search and see if anything actually shows (site:https://domain.com/webpage/ )

If something shows, then the page exists or existed on your site and you'll want to dig through - maybe there's a hack script on the site generating URLs.

If nothing shows, it's safe to 404 and not worry about it.

If anything did show in the search results, and you need it removed from Goolge, you can do this - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846

 

[Glass]

If you're seeing URLs for pages that never existed, it could be someone else spoofing Google's crawl or someone who created links to then push it on the web. Take one of the URLs, put it into Google Search and see if anything actually shows (site:https://domain.com/webpage/ )

If something shows, then the page exists or existed on your site and you'll want to dig through - maybe there's a hack script on the site generating URLs.

If nothing shows, it's safe to 404 and not worry about it.

If anything did show in the search results, and you need it removed from Goolge, you can do this - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846

Thank you for the reply. So I’ve done what you mentioned with a bunch of them, nothing comes up on Google when searching for the pages with the “site:” attribute.

So leaving them as 404 isn’t going to negatively affect me?

 

[Conor Treacy]

You should be just fine. They're legitimate 404 errors that never existed and shouldn't. You only need to worry about pages that actually existed on your site and then redirect if needed. It's perfectly fine for old pages that you no longer need to also be 404, as long as you're willing to lose any links etc that pointed to it.

My suggestion for you, feel free to ignore the fake urls and 404s. It's just annoying to see them inside of Google Search console report.