Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
-
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses.
We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed.
As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results.
Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
-
The last time I used a tool, excluding via robots.txt was also sufficient for URL removal.
Recently, Google has updated their documentation to strongly encourage you to use URL removal only for things like exposing confidential information, and not to clean up old pages or errors in your GWT account (see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119). I know many people still use the tool for that type of stuff, but wanted to point out that change.
-
Thank you Keri.
Yes, good idea, but whatever you request, that page or directory must respond with a 404, otherwise, it will be ignored.
- that is why I couldn't do that with the send to a friend URLs
(would have been a nice thing to do)
I guess I could have cheated, and made them return a 404 if it was google, just to dump them all out of the index.
The 15,000 I did request to be removed were individual pages, that returned 404 response code, so thats why I did them one at a time. I could have waited, but if you wait, then google keeps trying to fetch those missing pages and they keep reporting them in your GWT.
That is a good reason to request the removals.
I actually gave up when the number of deletions got to 1.5 million. I figured it was just too hard to do.
-
The last time I looked, you can request removal of an entire directory as well, which should work for the OP.
-
I would have said the same thing, except that a few weeks ago, I removed a rule from the robots file and I changed the affected pages to have a noindex.nofollow and the next day, tens of thousands of those pages appeared in the index and overpowered the content pages.
So my advice, is don't trust noindex,nofollow and just stop the robot going down that tree (as you are doing) and find another way to get those pages out of the index.
You can use the URL removal request tool.
It only seems to allow you to remove 1000 per day.
I have done this before by automating the removal using a macro program.
I think I removed about 15,000 over the space of a month, doing that.
They are fairly fast at removing URLs these days, 24 hours or less.
-
Disallowing in your robots.txt keeps the bots from indexing your pages going forward, but Google may keep returning them in search results. This post has great explanations about ways to remove pages from indices: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
The surefire way to get them out of the index is to remove the disallow from your robots.txt, and add a meta noindex tags on all the pages you want removed. Once they're reindexed by Google, they'll no longer appear in SERPs.
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
-
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Removing content from Google's Indexes
Hello Mozers My client asked a very good question today. I didn't know the answer, hence this question. When you submit a 'Removing content for legal reasons report': https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_legalother?product=websearch will the person(s) owning the website containing this inflammatory content recieve any communication from Google? My clients have already had the offending URL removed by a court order which was sent to the offending company. However now the site has been relocated and the same content is glaring out at them (and their potential clients) with the title "Solicitors from Hell + Brand name" immediately under their SERPs entry. **I'm going to follow the advice of the forum and try to get the url removed via Googles report system as well as the reargard action of increasing my clients SERPs entries via Social + Content. ** However, I need to be able to firmly tell my clients the implications of submitting a report. They are worried that if they rock the boat this URL (with open access for reporting of complaints) will simply get more inflammatory)! By rocking the boat, I mean, Google informing the owners of this "Solicitors from Hell" site that they have been reported for "hosting defamatory" content. I'm hoping that Google wouldn't inform such a site, and that the only indicator would be an absence of visits. Is this the case or am I being too optimistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
Google didn't indexed my domain.
I bought *out.com more than 1 year, google bot even don't come, then I put the domain to the domain parking. what can I do? I want google index me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yue0 -
Which index page should I canonical to?
Hello! I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag. On the index page, I have the following: I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.php Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference? Thanks! Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips1 -
Ranking with other pages not index
The site ranks on page 4-5 with other page like privacy, about us, term pages. I encounter this problem allot in the last weeks; this usually occurs after the page sits 1-2 months on page 1 for the terms. I'm thinking of to much use the same anchor as a primary issue. The sites in questions are 1-5 pages microniche sites. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m3fan0 -
Pages un-indexed in my site
My current website www.energyacuity.com has had most pages indexed for more than a year. However, I tried cache a few of the pages, and it looks the only one that is now indexed by Goggle is the homepage. Any thoughts on why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernatj0