Changed URL structure - duplicate results in Google

Marketing
1

Hello,
I made some minor changes to the URL structure of my website about two weeks ago. To be more precise, I use Wordpress and I switched from tags to custom taxonomies. For example:

/tag/stephen-king to /author/stephen-king

/tag/high-fantasy to /genre/high-fantasy

Then I redirected the /tag/ to /genre/ or /author/ accordingly in .htaccess with 301 redirect.

Is it normal that both versions appear in Google index? Let’s say, both /tag/high-fantasy and /genre/high-fantasy appear in search results, even though the first one redirects to the second one. Also Webmaster Tools gives me a lot of “HTML suggestions” regarding duplicate meta descriptions, etc. due to this.

2

In my limited experience, it does seem to take Google a little while to clean up its database, so I don’t think I’d worry about this (not yet, anyway). The 301 redirects are supposed to be the preferred way to direct the search engines to newer versions of a page.

3

This is completely normal… Your both URLs may appear in the search results. But as soon user clicks on redirecting URL he will redirected to main domain.

After sometime, Google will completely shift all the credit to main domain and remove your redirecting URL from the results.

4