DeIndexing pagination
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I have a custom made blog with boat loads of undesirable URLs in Google's index like this:
.com/resources?start=150
.com/resources?start=160
.com/resources?start=170I've identified this is a source of duplicate title tags and had my programmer put a no index tag to automatically go on all of these undesirable URLs like this:
However doing a site: search in google shows the URLs to still be indexed even though I've put the tag up a few weeks ago.
How do I get google to remove these URLs from the index? I'm aware that the Search Console has an answer here https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598466?authuser=1&authuser=1&rd=1 but it says that blocking with meta tags should work.
Do I just get google to crawl the URL again so it sees the tag and then deindexes the URLs? Or is there another way I'm missing.
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Adding a meta noindex tag can mean it takes a few weeks for a page to fall out of the index. These pages probably aren't doing you much harm, so if you wanted to just wait for them to fall out, that's probably fine (although I would update the tag content to "noindex, follow" to help Google crawl to the other noindexed pages). If you really want them out of the index faster, you could use the "Remove URLs" function under Google Index in Google Search Console, which will temporarily remove them from the index while Google is registering the noindex tags, or you can use the Fetch + Render tool and then Submit URLs in Google Search Console, which will cause Google to come back and crawl your pages and find the noindex tag.
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You could use URL parameter settings in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools - if all ?start= URLs can be treated the same way by Google.
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