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Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
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We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
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Hi michelleh
The solution given by Dan above is the most reliable method as robots.txt will not block pages that googlebot finds via an external link to the page. Given the reasoning behind your desire to noindex, reliability is extremely important.
Also, you want "noindex, follow" rather than "noindex, nofollow" as the nofollow will trap any link value coming into the pages (from both internal and external links) and stop it from flowing through the site.
Hope that helps,
Sha
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Is there any advantage to using "noindex, nofollow" over robots.txt? I've read that noindex, nofollow still accumulates pagerank for the page with the tag, but if we don't care about accumulating pagerank, is there any other advantage to using noindex, nofollow over robots.txt?
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Your other option is to use meta robots tag like this;
Its a one step process instead of two.
Full documentation on URL removal from index here and on the robots meta tag here
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Robots.txt, you can remove from google to hurry it up, using WMT, but first you need to block them in robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow:User-agent: Google
Disallow: /bad
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