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
-
If my products aren't showing in rich snippets, is there still value in adding product schema?
I'm adding category pages for an online auction site and trying to determine if its worth marking up the products listed on the page. All of the individual product pages have product schema, but I have never seen them show up in rich snippets likely due to the absence of the price element and the unique nature of the items. Is there still value in adding the product schema even if the items won't show in rich snippets? Also, is it possible the product schema will help optimize for commerce related keywords such as [artist name] + for sale?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Haleyb350 -
Copied Content - Define Canonical
Hello, The Story I am working on a news organization. Our website is the https://www.neakriti.gr My question regards copied content with source references. Sometimes a small portion of our content is based on some third article that is posted on some site (that is about 1% of our content). We always put "source" reference if that is the case. This is inevitable as "news" is something that sometimes has sources on other news sites, especially if there is something you cannot verify or don't have immediate sources, and therefore you need to state that "according to this source, something has happened". Here is one article of ours that has a source from another site: https://www.neakriti.gr/article/ellada-nea/1503363/nekros-vrethike-o-agnooumenos-arhimandritis-stin-lakonia/ if you open the above article you will see we have a link to the equivalent article of the original source site http://lakonikos.gr/epikairothta/item/133664-nekros-entopistike-o-arximandritis-p-andreas-bolovinos-synexis-enimerosi Now here is my question. I have read in other MOZ forum articles that a "canonical" approach solves this issue... How can we be legit when it comes to duplicate content in the eyes of search engines? Should we use some kind of canonical link to the source site? Should the "canonical" be inside the link in some way? Should it be on our section? Our site has AMP equivalent pages (if you add the /amp keyword at the end of the article URL). Our AMP pages have canonical to our original article. So if we have a "canonical" approach how would the AMP be effected as well? Also by applying a possible canonical solution to the source URL, does that "canonical" effect our article as not being shown in search results, thus passing all indexing to the canonical site? (I know that canonical indicates what URL is to be indexed). Additionally, does such a canonical indication make us legit in such a case in the eyes of search engines? (i.e. it eliminates any possible article duplication for original content in the eyes of search engines?). Or simply put, having a simple link to the original article (as we have it now) is enough for the search engines to understand that we have reference to original article URL? How would we approach this problem in our site based on its current structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisanif0 -
Scraped content ranking above the original source content in Google.
I need insights on how “scraped” content (exact copy-pasted version) rank above the original content in Google. 4 original, in-depth articles published by my client (an online publisher) are republished by another company (which happens to be briefly mentioned in all four of those articles). We reckon the articles were re-published at least a day or two after the original articles were published (exact gap is not known). We find that all four of the “copied” articles rank at the top of Google search results whereas the original content i.e. my client website does not show up in the even in the top 50 or 60 results. We have looked at numerous factors such as Domain authority, Page authority, in-bound links to both the original source as well as the URLs of the copied pages, social metrics etc. All of the metrics, as shown by tools like Moz, are better for the source website than for the re-publisher. We have also compared results in different geographies to see if any geographical bias was affecting results, reason being our client’s website is hosted in the UK and the ‘re-publisher’ is from another country--- but we found the same results. We are also not aware of any manual actions taken against our client website (at least based on messages on Search Console). Any other factors that can explain this serious anomaly--- which seems to be a disincentive for somebody creating highly relevant original content. We recognize that our client has the option to submit a ‘Scraper Content’ form to Google--- but we are less keen to go down that route and more keen to understand why this problem could arise in the first place. Please suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
On Page Content. has a H2 Tag but should I also use H3 tags for the sub headings within this body of content
Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
To noindex or not to noindex
Our website lets users test whether any given URL or keyword is censored in China. For each URL and keyword that a user looks up, a page is created, such as https://en.greatfire.org/facebook.com and https://zh.greatfire.org/keyword/freenet. From a search engines perspective, all these pages look very similar. For this reason we have implemented a noindex function based on certain rules. Basically, only highly ranked websites are allowed to be indexed - all other URLs are tagged as noindex (for example https://en.greatfire.org/www.imdb.com). However, we are not sure that this is a good strategy and so are asking - what should a website with a lot of similar content do? Don't noindex anything - let Google decide what's worth indexing and not. Noindex most content, but allow some popular pages to be indexed. This is our current approach. If you recommend this one, we would like to know what we can do to improve it. Noindex all the similar content. In our case, only let overview pages, blog posts etc with unique content to be indexed. Another factor in our case is that our website is multilingual. All pages are available (and equally indexed) in Chinese and English. Should that affect our strategy?References:https://zh.greatfire.orghttps://en.greatfire.orghttps://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agreatfire.org
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Homepage Content
I have a website which perform very well for some keywords and much less for other keywords. I would like to try to optimize the keywords with less performance. Let's say our website offers 2 main services: KEYWORD A and KEYWORD Z. KEYWORD Z is a very important keyword for us in terms of revenue. KEYWORD A gives us position Nr 1 on our local Google and redirect properly the visitors to xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php KEYWORD Z perform badly and gives us position Nr 7 on local Google search. 90% Google traffic is sent to xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php and the other 10% is sent to the home page of the website. The Homepage is a "soup" of all the services our company offers, some are important (KEYWORD Z) and other much less important. In order to optimize the keyword KEYWORD Z we were thinking to make a permanent redirect for xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php to xxxxxx.com and optimize the content of the Homepage to ONLY describe our KEYWORD Z. I am not sure if Google gives more importance in the content of the homepage or not. Of course links on the homepage to other pages like xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php will still exists. The point for us is maybe to optimize better the homepage and give more importance to the KEYWORD Z. Does it make sense or not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netbuilder0 -
Panda 2.5
I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links). Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites? What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process? I look forward to a great discussion. Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0