Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
How long after https migration that google shows in search console new sitemap being indexed?
We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 27, 2017, 7:40 PM | lcourse
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed? Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap?
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap. Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.0 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 28, 2017, 3:58 AM | odihost0 -
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 19, 2015, 2:37 PM | vivekrathore0 -
Best way to get pages indexed fast?
Any suggestion on best ways to get new sites pages indexed? Was thinking getting high pr inbound links on fiverr but always a little risky right? Thanks for your opinions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 20, 2012, 12:15 AM | mweidner27820 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 29, 2012, 7:39 AM | theLotter0 -
Old Redirecting Website Still Showing In SERPs
I have a client, a plumber, who bought another plumbing company (and that company's domain) at one point. This other company was very old and has a lot of name recognition so they created a dedicated page to this other company within their main website, and redirected the other company's old domain to that page. This has worked fine, in that this page on the main site is now #1 when you search for the other old company's name. But for some reason the old domain comes up #2 (despite the fact that it's redirecting). Now, I could understand if the redirect had only been set up recently, but I'm reasonably sure this happened about a year ago. Could it be due to the fact that there are many sites out there still linking to that old domain? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 13, 2011, 10:39 PM | VTDesignWorks1 -
Number of Indexed Pages are Continuously Going Down
I am working on online retail stores. Initially, Google have indexed 10K+ pages of my website. I have checked number of indexed page before one week and pages were 8K+. Today, number of indexed pages are 7680. I can't understand why should it happen and How can fix it? I want to index maximum pages of my website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 2, 2012, 9:34 PM | CommercePundit0