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Hi, I have been checking every possible resources for content removal, but I am still unsure on how to remove already indexed contents. When I use robots.txt alone, the urls will remain in the index, however no crawling budget is wasted on them, But still, e.g having 100,000+ completely identical login pages within the omitted results, might not mean anything good. When I use meta noindex alone, I keep my index clean, but also keep Googlebot busy with indexing these no-value pages. When I use robots.txt and meta noindex together for existing content, then I suggest Google, that please ignore my content, but at the same time, I restrict him from crawling the noindex tag. Robots.txt and url removal together still not a good solution, as I have failed to remove directories this way. It seems, that only exact urls could be removed like this. I need a clear solution, which solves both issues (index and crawling). What I try to do now, is the following: I remove these directories (one at a time to test the theory) from the robots.txt file, and at the same time, I add the meta noindex tag to all these pages within the directory. The indexed pages should start decreasing (while useless page crawling increasing), and once the number of these indexed pages are low or none, then I would put the directory back to robots.txt and keep the noindex on all of the pages within this directory. Can this work the way I imagine, or do you have a better way of doing so? Thank you in advance for all your help.

Hi, We have accidentally had Google indexed lots os our pages with no useful content at all on them. The site in question is a directory site, where we have tags and we have cities. Some cities have suppliers for almost all the tags, but there are lots of cities, where we have suppliers for only a handful of tags. The problem occured, when we created a page for each cities, where we list the tags as links. Unfortunately, our programmer listed all the tags, so not only the ones, where we have businesses, offering their services, but all of them! We have 3,142 cities and 542 tags. I guess, that you can imagine the problem this caused! Now I know, that Google might simply ignore these empty pages and not crawl them again, but when I check a city (city site:domain) with only 40 providers, I still have 1,050 pages indexed. (Yes, we have some issues between the 550 and the 1050 as well, but first things first:)) These pages might not be crawled again, but will be clicked, and bounces and the whole user experience in itself will be terrible. My idea is, that I might use meta noindex for all of these empty pages and perhaps also have a 301 redirect from all the empty category pages, directly to the main page of the given city. Can this work the way I imagine? Any better solution to cut this really bad nightmare short? Thank you in advance. Andras

Hello, Can anyone tell, if it is possible to protect text –type content without the rel=author tag? We host a business listing site, where, apart from the general contact information, we have also started to write original 800+ character-long unique and original contents for the suppliers, where we expect visits, so rankings should be increased. My issue is that this is a very competitive business, and content crawling is really an everyday practice. Of course, I would like to keep my original content or at least mark it as mine for Google. The easiest way would be the author tag, but the problem is, that I do not want our names and our photos to be assigned to these contents, because from one hand, we are not acknowledged content providers on our own (no bio and whatsoever), and on the other hand, we provide contents for every sort of businesses, so just having additional links to our other contents, might not help readers to get what they want. I also really do not think that a photo of me could help increase the CTR from the SERP:) What we currently do, is that we submit every major fresh content through url submission in WMT, hoping that first indexing might help. We have only a handful of them within a day, so not more than 10. Yes, I could perhaps use absolute links, but this one is not a feasible scenario in all cases, and about DMCA, as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own. So finally, I do not mind our contents being stolen, as I can’t possibly prevent this. I want however our original content to be recognized as ours by Google, even after the stealing is done. (Best would be an ’author tag for business’, so connected to our business Google+ page, but I am not aware, this function can be used this way.) Thank you in advance for all of you, sharing your thoughts with me on the topic.

Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras

We run a site, which is a directory type one, where visitors can look for local businesses per city as well (at some point similar to the 'Yelp concept'). Now, we use www.example.com as the homepage, and the www.example.com/city1, where city1 is the capital of our country, is 301 redirected to the homepage, so this is your default setting. When you choose e.g city2, your url changes to www.example.com/city2, and the city value is stored in a cookie. Then, when you leave the session, and return to the site later on, you will see the homepage url, but with your previous choice of city (in case you let cookies be stored). My concern is, that the meta title always contains the chosen city name, so when you return to the website, and you previously used city2, you will now see the homepage url (which normally belongs to city1), but with the meta title of city2 or with any other previously chosen city. Does this mean a problem, and should I always use the correct url, which would be www.example.com/cityX, or this could not cause a problem for me? If it does, would you mind sharing me the exact problems as well? Thanks,