Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index

    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.

    Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    9
    3463
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • BeTheBoss
      BeTheBoss last edited by

      6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google.

      It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index.

      I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Dr-Pete
        Dr-Pete Staff @BeTheBoss last edited by

        Hooray! Usually, I just give my advice and then run away, so it's always nice to hear I was actually right about something 😉 Seriously, glad you got it sorted out.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • BeTheBoss
          BeTheBoss @Dr-Pete last edited by

          Just a follow up to your suggestion.

          I created sitemaps for the pages I want removed using the google spreadsheet importXML functions, which saved a lot of time.

          It took a couple weeks but all of the pages, and similar pages, have successfully been removed from the index. Even the similar pages I didn't get a chance to put in the sitemap yet (importXML limits the results to 100).

          Your suggestion worked!

          Dr-Pete 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • BeTheBoss
            BeTheBoss @benjaminspak last edited by

            I can't 404 dynamic search pages.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • BeTheBoss
              BeTheBoss @Dr-Pete last edited by

              There are a mix of search pages and old mobile pages.

              The search pages I've been testing out having the canonical point to the default search page. I've seen a slight drop in these pages - but I guess I just have to be more patient.

              For the other pages the path is no longer there like you were mentioning. I like the idea of setting up the XML sitemap, I never even thought of making a bad/indexed page sitemap. I will give that a shot! Thankfully this will be a quick job with the importXml function in google spreadsheets! Great tip, hopefully it'll work.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Dr-Pete
                Dr-Pete Staff last edited by

                Is there a crawl path to them currently? One issue I see a lot is that a bunch of pages get indexed, the path is found and cut off, NOINDEX (canonical, 301, etc.) is added, but then the pages never get re-crawled. Since they don't get recrawled, the page-level directive never gets honored.

                If there's a URL parameter involved, you could use parameter-handling in GWT - it's not a perfect solution, but it sometimes seems to work without a re-crawl.

                The other option would be to create a new XML sitemap with all of the bad/indexed URLs. This may push Google to re-crawl them and then see the tags to deindex. It's a bit safer than re-opening the crawl paths.

                If they are being crawled and Google is just ignoring the NOINDEX for some reason, I'd try to 301 or canonical those pages to a primary search page, if that's feasible (probably canonical, since you don't want the users to 301). Sometimes, if a signal isn't working for that long, you just have to shake Google and try a different signal. Even following their exact recommendations, it rarely works as planned at large scale.

                BeTheBoss 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 2
                • MagicDude4Eva
                  MagicDude4Eva last edited by

                  Don't use GWMT's removal tool to remove URLs which should not be in the index (unless those expose sensitive information). Best practise is to exclude them in robots.txt and to also ensure that the pages either 404 or have a noindex,noarchive tag.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • benjaminspak
                    benjaminspak last edited by

                    Change the site structure and let the pages 404, Google will deindex them if they are not being linked to.

                    BeTheBoss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • AgentsofValue
                      AgentsofValue last edited by

                      You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file.  Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.

                      I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."

                      For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:

                      Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.php

                      That should work.  If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Got a burning SEO question?

                      Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                      Start my free trial


                      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.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • yaelslater

                        Page with metatag noindex is STILL being indexed?!

                        Hi Mozers, There are over 200 pages from our site that have a meta tag "noindex" but are STILL being indexed. What else can I do to remove them from the Index?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater
                        0
                      • benjaminleemd

                        My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.

                        My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO.  Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd
                        1
                      • MedGroupMedia

                        Removing index.php

                        I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page.  I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all.  Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL?  I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php.  However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo.  All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links?  I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales.  I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file.  But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia
                        0
                      • NerdsOnCall

                        What's the deal with significantLinks?

                        http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://moz.com/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall
                        0
                      • mudbugmedia

                        Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"

                        Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia
                        0
                      • digisavvy

                        There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?

                        Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy
                        0
                      • nicole.healthline

                        Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?

                        When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                        0
                      • Romancing

                        URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important

                        Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      • Digital Marketers
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.