Getting google impressions for a site not in the index...

[carl_daedricdigital]

Hi all

Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment.

Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues.

Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this.

Thanks,

Carl

image1.png

[carl_daedricdigital]

Hi Chris

Thanks for the reply.

I think i confused myself with terms. Meant added a noindex to the header of the pages in the relevant tags. We removed the urls from WMT which usually drops them all from the engine in a matter of hours but have read that sometimes this can expire so we put the noindex tag in place incase the WMT did happen to expire and the pages started to get indexed again.

Regards

Carl

[Chris.Menke]

Carl,

I'm wondering what you mean by "added noindex in the robots".

If you mean you disallowed those pages in the robots.txt file, that won't be enough to remove or keep them removed from the index.  Typically, the robots meta tag

[](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en)

is used to keep the pages out of the index.  And if you use the robots meta tag on those pages, do not use the robots.txt file to disallow bots from those pages, as that will prevent bots from viewing their meta data.

[carl_daedricdigital]

Sorry, it appeared I could only upload 1 image in the first post so here is the second image.

image2.png