undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    What is your Brand Authority?
    Moz

    What is your Brand Authority?

    Check yours now
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • SEO Q&A

      Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Mass Removal Request from Google Index

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

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
8
1.8k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • ioannisa
    ioannisa last edited by Apr 12, 2016, 7:00 PM

    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

    1. My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now
    2. 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/removals

    The 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=123456

    So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • KristinaKledzik
      KristinaKledzik @ioannisa last edited by Apr 15, 2016, 5:45 PM Apr 15, 2016, 5:45 PM

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ioannisa
        ioannisa last edited by Apr 15, 2016, 4:18 AM Apr 15, 2016, 4:05 AM

        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=12345678

        This is one of the articles that I removed from sitemap and site - (Status Code: 410)
        http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=894052

        Also 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-article

        Thank you so much!

        KristinaKledzik 1 Reply Last reply Apr 15, 2016, 5:45 PM Reply Quote 0
        • KristinaKledzik
          KristinaKledzik last edited by May 11, 2016, 7:55 AM Apr 14, 2016, 2:32 PM

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • ioannisa
            ioannisa last edited by Apr 13, 2016, 2:15 PM Apr 13, 2016, 2:13 PM

            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?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • GlobeRunner
              GlobeRunner last edited by May 11, 2016, 7:55 AM Apr 13, 2016, 12:29 PM

              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.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • ioannisa
                ioannisa last edited by Apr 13, 2016, 8:45 AM Apr 13, 2016, 5:44 AM

                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

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                  Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by Apr 13, 2016, 5:02 AM Apr 13, 2016, 5:02 AM

                  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.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • 1 / 1
                  1 out of 8
                  • First post
                    1/8
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • LindsayE

                    Can you index a Google doc?

                    We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 18, 2018, 8:56 AM | LindsayE
                    1
                  • Worthminer

                    Why Google isn't indexing my images?

                    Hello, on my fairly new website Worthminer.com I am noticing that Google is not indexing images from my sitemap. Already 560 images submitted and Google indexed only 3 of them. Altough there is more images indexed they are not indexing any new images, and I have no idea why. Posts, categories and other urls are indexing just fine, but images not. I am using Wordpress and for sitemaps Wordpress SEO by yoast. Am I missing something here? Why Google won't index my images? Thanks, I appreciate any help, David xv1GtwK.jpg

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 9, 2016, 2:40 PM | Worthminer
                    1
                  • danatanseo

                    How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?

                    We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 13, 2013, 6:49 PM | danatanseo
                    0
                  • edlondon

                    Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images

                    Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT.  If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'.  That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt.  As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in.  Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change.  But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact.  The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this.  I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 19, 2014, 8:51 AM | edlondon
                    0
                  • fablau

                    Is Google indexing Mp3 audio and MIDI music files? Can that cause any duplicate problems?

                    Hello, I own virtualsheetmusic.com website and we have several thousands of media files (Mp3 and MIDI files) that potentially Google can index. If that's the case, I am wondering if that could cause any "duplicate" issues of some sort since many of such media files have  exact file names or same meta information inside. Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome! Thank you in advance to anyone.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 24, 2013, 7:37 PM | fablau
                    0
                  • Tone_Agency

                    Wordpress blog in a subdirectory not being indexed by Google

                    HI MozzersIn my websites sitemap.xml, pages are listed, such as /blog/ and /blog/textile-fact-or-fiction-egyptian-cotton-explained/These pages are visible when you visit them in a browser and when you use the Google Webmaster tool - Fetch as Google to view them (see attachment), however they aren't being indexed in Google, not even the root directory for the blog (/blog/) is being indexed, and when we query:site: www.hilden.co.uk/blog/ It returns 0 results in Google.Also note that:The Wordpress installation is located at /blog/ which is a subdirectory of the main root directory which is managed by Magento. I'm wondering if this causing the problem.Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!AnthonyToTOHuj.png?1

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 10, 2013, 9:58 AM | Tone_Agency
                    0
                  • JohnPeters

                    Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?

                    Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its  basic question 😞

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 28, 2012, 1:08 PM | JohnPeters
                    0
                  • PaulRogers

                    Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?

                    I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 14, 2011, 1:19 PM | PaulRogers
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.