NOINDEX content still showing in SERPS after 2 months
-
I have a website that was likely hit by Panda or some other algorithm change. The hit finally occurred in September of 2011. In December my developer set the following meta tag on all pages that do not have unique content:
name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />
It's been 2 months now and I feel I've been patient, but Google is still showing 10,000+ pages when I do a search for site:http://www.mydomain.com
I am looking for a quicker solution. Adding this many pages to the robots.txt does not seem like a sound option. The pages have been removed from the sitemap (for about a month now). I am trying to determine the best of the following options or find better options.
- 301 all the pages I want out of the index to a single URL based on the page type (location and product). The 301 worries me a bit because I'd have about 10,000 or so pages all 301ing to one or two URLs. However, I'd get some link juice to that page, right?
- Issue a HTTP 404 code on all the pages I want out of the index. The 404 code seems like the safest bet, but I am wondering if that will have a negative impact on my site with Google seeing 10,000+ 404 errors all of the sudden.
- Issue a HTTP 410 code on all pages I want out of the index. I've never used the 410 code and while most of those pages are never coming back, eventually I will bring a small percentage back online as I add fresh new content. This one scares me the most, but am interested if anyone has ever used a 410 code.
Please advise and thanks for reading.
-
Just wanted to let you know that submitting all the sites I wanted removed into an XML sitemap worked. I then submitted that sitemap to webmaster tools and listed it in the robots.txt. When doing query "site:domain.com" index pages went from 20k+ down to 700 in a matter of days.
-
I could link to them then, but what about creating a custom sitemap for just content that I want removed? Would that have the same effect?
-
If they are not linked to then spiders will not find the noindex code. They could suffer in the SERPs for months and months.
-
If all these pages are under a directory structure than you have the option to remove a complete directory in URL removal option. See if that is feasible in your case.
-
I suppose I'll wait longer. Crawl rate over the last 90 days is a high of 3,285 and average of 550 with a low of 3 according to webmaster tools.
-
Yeah the pages are low PR and are not linked to at all from the site. I've never heard of removing a page via webmaster tools. How do I do that? I also have to remove several thousand.
*edit: It looks like I have to remove them one at a time which is not feasible in my case. Is there a faster way?
-
If you want a page out of the index fast the best way is to do it through webmaster tools. It's easy and lasts for about six months. Then, if they find your page again it will register the noindex and you should be fine.
As EGOL said, if it's a page that isn't crawled very often then it could be a LONG time before it gets deindexed.
-
I removed some pages from the index and used the same line of code...
name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />
My pages dropped from the index within 2 or 3 days - but this is a site that has very heavy spider activity.
If your site is not crawled very much or these are low PR pages (such as PR1, PR2) it could take google a while to revisit and act upon your noindex instructions - but two months seems a bit long.
Is your site being crawled vigorously? Look in webmaster tools to see if crawling declined abruptly when your rankings fell. Check there also for crawl problems.
If I owned your site and the PR of these pages is low I would wait a while longer before doing anything. If my patience was wearing thin I would do the 301 redirect because that will transfer the linkjuice from those pages to the target URL of the redirect - however, you might wait quite a while to see the redirect take effect. That's why my first choice would be to wait longer.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes. Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content. As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google. My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way. Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Site Has Not Recovered (Still!) from Penguin
Hello, I have a site that just keeps getting hit with a ton of bad, unnatural backlinks due to the sins from previous SEO companies they've hired. About every quarter, I have to add more bad links to their disavow file... still. Is it time to move them to a new domain? Perhaps a .net? If so, do we just completely trash the old domain & not redirect it? I've never had a client like this in the past but they still want to maintain their branded name. Thanks for your feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinaMumm0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
How would you structure this content?
We have a site where we write about our son who was born with Down syndrome. I had a question regarding some content I'm trying to create and structure and hoping you guys can point me in the right direction. One of the things we are often asked by new parents is what toys we suggest for people to buy for their child with Down syndrome, or as gifts for a friend who has a child with Down syndrome. So I'd like to write some posts that suggest great toys for each year of a kids life (and continue that as Noah grows.) However, there are some variations of key words that I would like to rank for as well and it gets a little messy, which is where I need the help. For example for each year I could have a post titled: Top Ten (I could also change out top ten for Best, etc..)Toys For A One Year Old with Down Syndr Top Ten Christmas Gift Ideas For A One Year Old With Down Syndrome Top Ten Birthday Gift Ideas For a One Year Old With D.S. Top Ten Learning Toys For A One Year Old With D.S. Top Ten Toys Under 25 Dollars For A One Year Old with DS Top Ten Developmental Toys for a One Year Old With DS Top Ten Fisher Price Toys for a child with ds Best Light Up Toys For a one year old with ds best muscial toys for a one year old with ds I could also think of other variations as well. Also I can make each of these with the various ages. 2 year old, 3 year old, etc... So I'm not sure what the best way to go is. I could easily have a ton of content that is all virtually the same (birthday gifts / christmas gifts..although I could suggest different toys) so I'd have a ton of different toys pages trying to rank for one term each that is good for google searchers but probably not so great for folks coming to my site as I would have toy pages scattered all over the site. I also don't know how landing pages would fit in to all of this. Would I want a "Down Syndrome Toy Guide" landing page, or "Down Syndrome Gift Guide" ... or both...or something else, and then link all of those other pages on that page? I have a few pages on my site now that I wrote before I started to think about all the different combinations I wanted to rank for: http://noahsdad.com/gift-ideas-down-syndrome/ and http://noahsdad.com/best-fisher-price-learning-toys/ I'm open to any feedback you guys may have on this. I'd also like to do some posts on "Down Syndrome Books" and hope to use the same info that you guys give me and apply to books. (Therapy books, touch and feel books, resource books, new parents books, etc..) Hoping some folks chime in as your help would really be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0 -
First link importance in the content
Hi, have you guys an opinion on this point, mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2010 : Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this. http://searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457 I've asked this in private and Michael Cottam told me he read a study a year ago that indicated that the link juice passed to other pages diminished the further down the page you go. But he can't find it anymore ! Do you remember this study and have the link ? What is your opinion on Matt's point ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baptisteplace0