NOINDEX content still showing in SERPS after 2 months
-
I have a website that was likely hit by Panda or some other algorithm change. The hit finally occurred in September of 2011. In December my developer set the following meta tag on all pages that do not have unique content:
name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />
It's been 2 months now and I feel I've been patient, but Google is still showing 10,000+ pages when I do a search for site:http://www.mydomain.com
I am looking for a quicker solution. Adding this many pages to the robots.txt does not seem like a sound option. The pages have been removed from the sitemap (for about a month now). I am trying to determine the best of the following options or find better options.
- 301 all the pages I want out of the index to a single URL based on the page type (location and product). The 301 worries me a bit because I'd have about 10,000 or so pages all 301ing to one or two URLs. However, I'd get some link juice to that page, right?
- Issue a HTTP 404 code on all the pages I want out of the index. The 404 code seems like the safest bet, but I am wondering if that will have a negative impact on my site with Google seeing 10,000+ 404 errors all of the sudden.
- Issue a HTTP 410 code on all pages I want out of the index. I've never used the 410 code and while most of those pages are never coming back, eventually I will bring a small percentage back online as I add fresh new content. This one scares me the most, but am interested if anyone has ever used a 410 code.
Please advise and thanks for reading.
-
Just wanted to let you know that submitting all the sites I wanted removed into an XML sitemap worked. I then submitted that sitemap to webmaster tools and listed it in the robots.txt. When doing query "site:domain.com" index pages went from 20k+ down to 700 in a matter of days.
-
I could link to them then, but what about creating a custom sitemap for just content that I want removed? Would that have the same effect?
-
If they are not linked to then spiders will not find the noindex code. They could suffer in the SERPs for months and months.
-
If all these pages are under a directory structure than you have the option to remove a complete directory in URL removal option. See if that is feasible in your case.
-
I suppose I'll wait longer. Crawl rate over the last 90 days is a high of 3,285 and average of 550 with a low of 3 according to webmaster tools.
-
Yeah the pages are low PR and are not linked to at all from the site. I've never heard of removing a page via webmaster tools. How do I do that? I also have to remove several thousand.
*edit: It looks like I have to remove them one at a time which is not feasible in my case. Is there a faster way?
-
If you want a page out of the index fast the best way is to do it through webmaster tools. It's easy and lasts for about six months. Then, if they find your page again it will register the noindex and you should be fine.
As EGOL said, if it's a page that isn't crawled very often then it could be a LONG time before it gets deindexed.
-
I removed some pages from the index and used the same line of code...
name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />
My pages dropped from the index within 2 or 3 days - but this is a site that has very heavy spider activity.
If your site is not crawled very much or these are low PR pages (such as PR1, PR2) it could take google a while to revisit and act upon your noindex instructions - but two months seems a bit long.
Is your site being crawled vigorously? Look in webmaster tools to see if crawling declined abruptly when your rankings fell. Check there also for crawl problems.
If I owned your site and the PR of these pages is low I would wait a while longer before doing anything. If my patience was wearing thin I would do the 301 redirect because that will transfer the linkjuice from those pages to the target URL of the redirect - however, you might wait quite a while to see the redirect take effect. That's why my first choice would be to wait longer.
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
-
Duplicate content with URLs
Hi all, Do you think that is possible to have duplicate content issues because we provide a unique image with 5 different URLs ? In the HTML code pages, just one URL is provide. It's enough for that Google don't see the other URLs or not ? Example, in this article : http://www.parismatch.com/People/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112 The same image is available on: http://cdn-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize1-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize2-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize3-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg Thank you very much for your help. Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Julien.Ferras0 -
Dtox showing 64% of backlinks are TOX1 but still ranking
A local business has been smashing the SERPs for a while now, but since May (updates) it has been sliding and search visibility has plummeted. They came to me for help, so I ran a Dtox report and it's showing a lot of bad links (2,863 links in total). TOX1 are deindexed website so it was being linked to from a huge private blog network. MY question is, with only 209 decent links pointing to them, are they ranking because Google hasn't picked up all the shitty links or DESPITE them? I assume that after Google deindexes a domain, that link is wiped out in their index? Which is the reason for the huge drop in rankings and visibility. However, they are still there or there abouts for 40% of their keywords. Whats the best course of action here, do you think? They haven't had a penalty (as far as I know). Should I proceed to disavow? Leave them to drop away and juts build quality links? I don't want to disrupt anything at the moment, they still do well in bing. They say their rankings are slowly sliding. Any ideas would be good!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter1 -
Wordpress and duplicate content
Hi, I have recently installed wordpress and started a blog but now loads of duplicate pages are cropping up for tags and authors and dates etc. How do I do the canonical thing in wordpress? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
I have search result pages that are completely different showing up as duplicate content.
I have numerous instances of this same issue in our Crawl Report. We have pages showing up on the report as duplicate content - they are product search result pages for completely different cruise products showing up as duplicate content. Here's an example of 2 pages that appear as duplicate : http://www.shopforcruises.com/carnival+cruise+lines/carnival+glory/2013-09-01/2013-09-30 http://www.shopforcruises.com/royal+caribbean+international/liberty+of+the+seas We've used Html 5 semantic markup to properly identify our Navigation <nav>, our search widget as an <aside>(it has a large amount of page code associated with it). We're using different meta descriptions, different title tags, even microformatting is done on these pages so our rich data shows up in google search. (rich snippet example - http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.shopforcruises.com%2Froyal%2Bcaribbean%2Binternational%2Fliberty%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bseas&oq=http:%2F%2Fwww.shopforcruises.com%2Froyal%2Bcaribbean%2Binternational%2Fliberty%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bseas&gs_l=hp.3...1102.1102.0.1601.1.1.0.0.0.0.142.142.0j1.1.0...0.0...1c.1.7.psy-ab.gvI6vhnx8fk&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44442042,d.eWU&fp=a03ba540ff93b9f5&biw=1680&bih=925 ) How is this distinctly different content showing as duplicate? Is SeoMoz's site crawl flawed (or just limited) and it's not understanding that my pages are not dupe? Copyscape does not identify these pages as dupe. Should we take these crawl results more seriously than copyscape? What action do you suggest we take? </aside> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JMFieldMarketing0 -
Still Going Down In Search
After signing up to SEOmoz as a pro user and sorting out all the things that the search flagged up with our website (htyp://www.whosjack.org) we jumped very slightly in search only to continue going down again. We are a news based site, we have no dup content, we have good writers and good orangic links etc I am currently very close to having to call it a day. Can anyone suggest anything at all from looking at the site or suggest a good SEO firm that I could talk to who might be able to work out the issue as I am totally at a loss as to what do do now. Any help or suggestions greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
What to do when unique content is out of the question?
SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
How are they avoiding duplicate content?
One of the largest stores in USA for soccer runs a number of whitelabel sites for major partners such as Fox and ESPN. However, the effect of this is that they are creating duplicate content for their products (and even the overall site structure is very similar). Take a look at: http://www.worldsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.foxsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.soccernetstore.com/23147.html You can see that practically everything is the same including: product URL product title product description My question is, why is Google not classing this as duplicate content? Have they coded for it in a certain way or is there something I'm missing which is helping them achieve rankings for all sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Geo-Targeting Content
I'm to get some ideas on restructuring existing content for geo-targeting. Example: Botox Page Tis is a hypothetical situation -- laser cosmetics clinic in Atlanta trying to rank for Atlanta Botox. The existing content is general information about botox procedures. The problem is editing the content to add Atlanta to the H1 tag and page copy. I'm wondering if there are some techniques to make the edits flow better? My idea is to add a geo-page for each procedure, but I'm wondering if this might interrupt or confuse users in the navigation funnel. Your thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 190west0