Why is google not deindexing pages with the meta noindex tag?
-
On our website www.keystonepetplace.com we added the meta noindex tag to category pages that were created by the sorting function.
Google no longer seems to be adding more of these pages to the index, but the pages that were already added are still in the index when I check via site:keystonepetplace.com
Here is an example page: http://www.keystonepetplace.com/dog/dog-food?limit=50
How long should it take for these pages to disappear from the index?
-
Google might have already crawled the pages but not indexed them yet. Be patient , if you have enough links coming in and the pages are less than 3 levels deep they will all be crawled and indexed in no time.
-
I guess it depends on the urgency of your situation. If you were just trying to clean things up then it's okay to wait for Google to re-crawl and solve the problem. But if you have been affected by panda and your site is not ranking then I personally would consider that an urgent enough need to use the tool.
-
This link almost makes it seem like I shouldn't use the webmaster tools removal.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119
-
The crawlers have so many billions of webpages to get to. We have more than 50,000 on our site; there's about 8,000 that they check more regularly than the others - some are just really deep on the site and hard to get to.
-
You can remove entire category directories from the index in one command using the tool. But the urls won't be removed from the cache, just the index. To remove them from the cache you'll need to enter each url individually. I think that if you are trying to clear things up for Panda reasons, just removing from the index is enough. However, I'm currently trying to decide if it will speed things up to remove from the cache as well.
-
Ok. That makes sense. I wonder why it takes so long? I'll start the long process of the manual removal.
-
Streamline Metrics has got it right.
I've seen pages take MONTHS to drop out of the index after being noindexed. It's best to use the URL removal tool in WMT (not to be confused with the disavow tool) to tell Google to not only deindex the pages but to remove them from the cache as well. I have found that when you do this the pages are gone within 12 hours.
-
In your experience how long does this normally take?
-
Yes it was around December 2nd or 3rd that we added the noindex tags. It just seemed like google wasn't removing any pages yet from the index. It did stop google from adding more of these pages though.
-
It all depends on how long it takes Google to re-crawl those pages with the no index tag on them.
I would do this along with the steps you have already taken in order to help speed the process up if you are in a hurry
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663419
-
Do you know when you added the noindex tags? Google will need to recrawl the pages to see the noindex tags before removing them. I just looked at one your category pages and it looks like it was cached by Google on December 1st, and there was no noindex tag on that page. Depending on how big your site is and how often your site is crawled will determine when they will be removed from the index. Here's Google's official explanation -
"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results.
Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there's a small chance that Googlebot won't see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it's probably because we haven't crawled your site since you added the tag. (Also, if you've used your robots.txt file to block this page, we won't be able to see the tag either.)
If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. To expedite removal, use the URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
-
Or canonical or by robots.txt
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
-
Can you force Google to use meta description?
Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
Different meta descriptions for same page
Hi Depending what terms I put into Google I am seeing a different meta description for exactly the same page. I have checked Umbraco CMS and everything seems in working order. Is there a reason this would be happening? Anyone else had trouble like this?
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Noindex search result pages Add Classifieds site
Dear All, Is it a good idea to noindex the search result pages of a classified site?
Technical SEO | | te_c
Taking into account that category pages are also search result pages, I would say it is not a good idea, but the whole information is in the sitemap, google can index individual listings (which are index, follow) anyway. What would you do? What kind of effects has in the indexing of the site, marking the search result pages as "search results" with schema.org microdata? Many thanks for your help, Best Regards, Daniel0 -
What if meta description tag comes before meta title tag? Do the search engines disregard or penalize if the order is not title then description in the HTML?
Do the search engines disregard or penalize if the order is not title then description in the HTML? A client's webmaster is a newbie to SEO and did just this. Suggestions?
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow". Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator. Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be... Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Will a drop in indexed pages significantly affect Google rankings?
I am doing some research into why we were bumped from Google's first page into the 3rd, fourth and fifth pages in June of 2010. I always suspected Caffeine, but I just came across some data that indicates a drop in indexed pages from 510 in January of that year to 133 by June. I'm not sure what happened but I believe our blog pages were de-indexed somehow. What I want to know is could that significant drop in indexed pages have had an effect on our rankings at that time? We are back up to over 500 indexed pages, but have not fully recovered our first page positions.
Technical SEO | | rdreich490 -
Google counting numbers of products on category pages - what about pagination ?
Hi there, Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached). My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ? Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section! Any help much appreciated, Stuart b4urme.jpg
Technical SEO | | stukerr0