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.
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
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removalsThe 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=123456So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?
-
Hi Ioannis,
What about the first suggestion? Can you create a page linking to all of the pages that you'd like to remove, then have Google crawl that page?
Best,
Kristina
-
Thank you Kristina,
I know about the URL structure, I have been trying the past few months to cleanse this site that I was not involved in its creation. It has several more SEO problems that have either been fixed or not yet, but we are talking about more than 50 SEO problems I've found so far - most of these critical.
On the sitemap that I built, the junk pages do not exist, and because this is sitemap I have written myself, I can easily make another containing the articles that I have removed (just reverse a part of my select query for the sitemap to get the ones I have removed).
http://www.neakriti.gr/webservices/sitemap-index.aspx
So far I implemented the last of your suggestions and here is an example:
This is a valid article page
http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=1314221 - (Status Code: 200)This is a non existent article page (never existed at the first place) - (Status Code: 404)
http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=12345678This is one of the articles that I removed from sitemap and site - (Status Code: 410)
http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=894052Also I would like you to take a look at another question about the same site and see that it can relate to this question with garbage articles too...
https://moz.com/community/q/multiple-instances-of-the-same-articleThank you so much!
-
Hi Ioannis,
You're in quite a bind here, without a good URL structure! I don't think there's any one perfect option, but I think all of these will work:
- Create a page on your site that links to every article you would like to delete, keeping those articles 404/410ed. Then, use the Fetch as Googlebot tool, and ask Google to crawl the page plus all of its links. This will get Google to quickly crawl all of those pages, see that they're gone, and remove them from their index. Keep in mind that if you just use a 404, Google may keep the page around for a bit to make sure you didn't just mess up. As Eric said, a 410 is more of a sure thing.
- Create an XML sitemap of those deleted articles, and have Google crawl it. Yes, this will create errors in GSC, but errors in GSC mean that they're concerned you've made a mistake, not that they're necessarily penalizing you. Just mark those guys as fixed and take the sitemap down once Google's crawled it.
- 410 these pages, remove all internal links to them (use a tool like Screaming Frog to make sure you didn't miss any links!), and remove them from your sitemap. That'll distance you from that old, crappy content, and Google will slowly realize that it's been removed as it checks in on its old pages. This is probably the least satisfying option, but it's an option that'll get the job done eventually.
Hope this helps! Let us know what you decide to do.
Best,
Kristina
-
Thank you,
so you suggest that based on my date based query, instead of blocking everything before that date blindly, keep blocking it with 410, while anything that doesn't exist anyway return 404.
Also another question, about the blocked articles that return 410, should I put their URLs back on the xml sitemap or not?
-
Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 should return a custom 410 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article.
The error returned should be a "410 gone" and not just a 404. That way Google will treat it differently, and may remove it from the index faster than just returning a 404. Also, you can use the Google removal tool, as well. Don't forget the robots.txt file, as well, there may be directories with the content that you need to disallow.
But overall, using a 410 is going to be better and most likely faster.
-
Thank you for your response.
I defenintelly cannot use noindex because as I explained I changed all articles prior to the minimum given date to return 404. So this content is not visibly available on the web in order to contain a noindex directive. Unless you mean to have it at my custom 404 page, where yes its there.
Also there is no folder to associate in robots, since they are in ugly form of GET params like DOCID=12345. So given that, there are thousands of DocIDs that are junk and removed, and thousands that are the actuall articles.
So I assumed that creating a "deleted articles" sitemap where each <url>will contain an <expires>2016-06-01</expires> tag seemed the most logical thing, but I am afraid its for "custom search engines", rather than for normal de-index requests as its provided bellow</url>
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing
-
Sitemaps is definitely not the way to go for this as you can't just have an expires tag in there and it would make pages go away. The best option to go with is the meta robots and then put them either on nonindex, nofollow, or noindex, follow. With this approach and hopefully with a relative high crawl rate you can make sure that the data from these pages will be removed from the Google Index as soon as possible.
If you still want these pages to be indexed but maybe just not have them crawled anymore, which I don't think you'd like to do based on your explanation then go with robots.txt and excluding the pages in there that you'd like to.
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 do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
301s being indexed
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Is there a way to get a list of Total Indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools?
I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up. I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove. Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sparrowdog0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0