I've changed my URL schema. How do I tell Google to index the new schema and forget the old one?

Posted by growse on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by growse
Published on 2012-11-30T12:23:26Z Indexed on 2012/11/30 17:21 UTC
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google-webmaster-tools

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indexing

I had a site where the urls were constructed like this

/index.php/Topic
/index.php/AnotherTopic

These were indexed in google, and search results returned that pointed to these.

However, I've recently replatformed that site, and reconfigured it so the above urls would be:

/index.php?title=Topic
/index.php?title=AnotherTopic

The original urls are returning 404s. The site is linking to the correct URL schema internally, but Google is retaining the original schema in its search results. I've updated and resubmitted the sitemap which only contains the new schema. Also, Google's webmasters tool is going slightly bananas at the fact there's now a spike in 404 errors in its crawl results.

What would be the best approach to get Google to 'forget' about the old schema, and instead index the new schema? Should I try blocking /index.php/ in robots.txt? Should I be returning 301 codes instead of 404 for the original urls?

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