Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
-
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses.
We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed.
As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results.
Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
-
The last time I used a tool, excluding via robots.txt was also sufficient for URL removal.
Recently, Google has updated their documentation to strongly encourage you to use URL removal only for things like exposing confidential information, and not to clean up old pages or errors in your GWT account (see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119). I know many people still use the tool for that type of stuff, but wanted to point out that change.
-
Thank you Keri.
Yes, good idea, but whatever you request, that page or directory must respond with a 404, otherwise, it will be ignored.
- that is why I couldn't do that with the send to a friend URLs
(would have been a nice thing to do)
I guess I could have cheated, and made them return a 404 if it was google, just to dump them all out of the index.
The 15,000 I did request to be removed were individual pages, that returned 404 response code, so thats why I did them one at a time. I could have waited, but if you wait, then google keeps trying to fetch those missing pages and they keep reporting them in your GWT.
That is a good reason to request the removals.
I actually gave up when the number of deletions got to 1.5 million. I figured it was just too hard to do.
-
The last time I looked, you can request removal of an entire directory as well, which should work for the OP.
-
I would have said the same thing, except that a few weeks ago, I removed a rule from the robots file and I changed the affected pages to have a noindex.nofollow and the next day, tens of thousands of those pages appeared in the index and overpowered the content pages.
So my advice, is don't trust noindex,nofollow and just stop the robot going down that tree (as you are doing) and find another way to get those pages out of the index.
You can use the URL removal request tool.
It only seems to allow you to remove 1000 per day.
I have done this before by automating the removal using a macro program.
I think I removed about 15,000 over the space of a month, doing that.
They are fairly fast at removing URLs these days, 24 hours or less.
-
Disallowing in your robots.txt keeps the bots from indexing your pages going forward, but Google may keep returning them in search results. This post has great explanations about ways to remove pages from indices: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
The surefire way to get them out of the index is to remove the disallow from your robots.txt, and add a meta noindex tags on all the pages you want removed. Once they're reindexed by Google, they'll no longer appear in SERPs.
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
-
What to do if lots of backend pages have been indexed by Google erroneously?
Hi Guys Our developer forgot to add a no index no follow tag on the pages he created in the back-end. So we have now ended up with lots of back end pages being indexed in google. So my question is, since many of those are now indexed in Google, so is it enough to just place a no index no follow on those or should we do a 301 redirect on all those to the most appropriate page? If a no index no follow is enough, that would create lots of 404 errors so could those affect the site negatively? Cheers Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martin19700 -
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi, I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice? Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too. Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Google is indexing the wrong page
Hello, I have a site I am optimizing and I cant seem to get a particular listing onto the first page due to the fact google is indexing the wrong page. I have the following scenario. I have a client with multiple locations. To target the locations I set them up with URLs like this /<cityname>-wedding-planner.</cityname> The home page / is optimized for their port saint lucie location. the page /palm-city-wedding-planner is optimized for the palm city location. the page /stuart-wedding-planner is optimized for the stuart location. Google picks up the first two and indexes them properly, BUT the stuart location page doesnt get picked up at all, instead google lists / which is not optimized at all for stuart. How do I "let google know" to index the stuart landing page for the "stuart wedding planner" term? MOZ also shows the / page as being indexed for the stuart wedding planner term as well but I assume this is just a result of what its finding when it performs its searches.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mediagiant0 -
How do i prevent Google and Moz from counting pages as duplicates?
I have 130,000 profiles on my site. When not Connected to them they have very few differences. So a bot - not logged in, etc, will see a login form and "Connect to Profilename" MOZ and Google call the links the same, even though theyre unique such as example.com/id/328/name-of-this-group example.com/id/87323/name-of-a-different-group So how do i separate them? Can I use Schema or something to help identify that these are profile pages, or that the content on them should be ignored as its help text, etc? Take facebook - each facebook profile for a name renders simple results: https://www.facebook.com/public/John-Smith https://www.facebook.com/family/Smith/ Would that be duplicate data if facebook had a "Why to join" article on all of those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inmn0 -
Google + Local Pages
Hi, If I have a company with multipul addresses, Do I create separate Google + page for each area?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
How does google count a menu on each page
Hello, Just wondering how google treats the TOp and bottom menu that you see on each page of a website ? Does it count it on all the pages in terms of link juice, or is it just there for user experience and only what it counts are the links in the content of a page or on the side ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0