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
-
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?
-
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.
-
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!
-
I can't 404 dynamic search pages.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Change the site structure and let the pages 404, Google will deindex them if they are not being linked to.
-
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.
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
-
Google indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Why is rel="canonical" pointing at a URL with parameters bad?
Context Our website has a large number of crawl issues stemming from duplicate page content (source: Moz). According to an SEO firm which recently audited our website, some amount of these crawl issues are due to URL parameter usage. They have recommended that we "make sure every page has a Rel Canonical tag that points to the non-parameter version of that URL…parameters should never appear in Canonical tags." Here's an example URL where we have parameters in our canonical tag... http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/ rel="canonical" href="http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/?pageSize=0&pageSizeBottom=0" /> Our website runs on IBM WebSphere v 7. Questions Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL? What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters? Any advice for correcting this? Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solid_Gold1 -
Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them). I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether. It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google. How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
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 | | mudbugmedia0