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 -
Best Practice Approaches to Canonicals vs. Indexing in Google Sitemap vs. No Follow Tags
Hi There, I am working on the following website: https://wave.com.au/ I have become aware that there are different pages that are competing for the same keywords. For example, I just started to update a core, category page - Anaesthetics (https://wave.com.au/job-specialties/anaesthetics/) to focus mainly around the keywords ‘Anaesthetist Jobs’. But I have recognized that there are ongoing landing pages that contain pretty similar content: https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ https://wave.com.au/asa/ We want to direct organic traffic to our core pages e.g. (https://wave.com.au/job-specialties/anaesthetics/). This then leads me to have to deal with the duplicate pages with either a canonical link (content manageable) or maybe alternatively adding a no-follow tag or updating the robots.txt. Our resident developer also suggested that it might be good to use Google Index in the sitemap to tell Google that these are of less value? What is the best approach? Should I add a canonical link to the landing pages pointing it to the category page? Or alternatively, should I use the Google Index? Or even another approach? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Client has moved to secured https webpages but non secured http pages are still being indexed in Google. Is this an issue
We are currently working with a client that relaunched their website two months ago to have hypertext transfer protocol secure pages (https) across their entire site architecture. The problem is that their non secure (http) pages are still accessible and being indexed in Google. Here are our concerns: 1. Are co-existing non secure and secure webpages (http and https) considered duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications
2. If these pages are duplicate content should we use 301 redirects or rel canonicals?
3. If we go with rel canonicals, is it okay for a non secure page to have rel canonical to the secure version? Thanks for the advice.0 -
Is it possible to get a list of pages indexed in Google?
Is there a tool that will give me a list of pages on my site that are indexed in Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rise10 -
Google Experiment
Hi there, are there any implications for organic seo for implementing google experiment. Where you send users to a new page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Links on Google Notebook
I have used OSE to look at links of a competitors site and notice they have dozens for links from Google Notebook pages eg http://www.google.pl/notebook/public/05275990022886032509/BDQExDQoQs8r3ls4j This page has a PA of 48 Is this a legitimate linking strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
IP address being indexed by Google in addition to canonical domain.
Our site's IP address is being indexed in addition to the canonical www.example.com domain. As soon as it was flagged a 301 was implemented in the .htaccess file to redirect the IP address to the canonical. Does this usually occur? Is it detrimental to SEO? In my time in SEO I've never heard of this being an issue, or being part of a list of things to be checked. It sounds more like a server that wasn't configured correctly when hosting was set up? It didn't seem to be affecting the site at all, but is it more common and I've just never heard of it? 😛 Should it be something I'm usually looking for in future? Responses are greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeimrie0