Google SERPs and NoIndex directives.
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We have pages that have been added to robots.txt as url patterns in DisAllow. Also, we have the meta noindex tags on the pages themselves. But we are finding the pages in index. I don't think they are higher up in the rankings and they don't have any descriptions, any previews or any cached pages. Why does Google show these pages? Could it be due to internal or external linking?
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We had the robots.txt changes & meta tags since the launch of these pages. We have internal links to these pages via <a>tags. So, should we remove the robots.txt disallows? Also, does adding nofollow on the links help?</a>
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If Google is forbidden from lookiing at the content of the page by the robots.txt they will not see the meta noindex tag.
I added noindex tags to a couple of pages 2 days ago and they are already out of the index.
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If you just added the tags then it may take time to drop them.
If you have not asked Google through Webmaster tools to remove these URLS I would make that my next step.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663416
The above link is to a few scenarios of Link removal in Webmaster Tools
Shane
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