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.
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
-
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses.
We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed.
As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results.
Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
-
The last time I used a tool, excluding via robots.txt was also sufficient for URL removal.
Recently, Google has updated their documentation to strongly encourage you to use URL removal only for things like exposing confidential information, and not to clean up old pages or errors in your GWT account (see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119). I know many people still use the tool for that type of stuff, but wanted to point out that change.
-
Thank you Keri.
Yes, good idea, but whatever you request, that page or directory must respond with a 404, otherwise, it will be ignored.
- that is why I couldn't do that with the send to a friend URLs
(would have been a nice thing to do)
I guess I could have cheated, and made them return a 404 if it was google, just to dump them all out of the index.
The 15,000 I did request to be removed were individual pages, that returned 404 response code, so thats why I did them one at a time. I could have waited, but if you wait, then google keeps trying to fetch those missing pages and they keep reporting them in your GWT.
That is a good reason to request the removals.
I actually gave up when the number of deletions got to 1.5 million. I figured it was just too hard to do.
-
The last time I looked, you can request removal of an entire directory as well, which should work for the OP.
-
I would have said the same thing, except that a few weeks ago, I removed a rule from the robots file and I changed the affected pages to have a noindex.nofollow and the next day, tens of thousands of those pages appeared in the index and overpowered the content pages.
So my advice, is don't trust noindex,nofollow and just stop the robot going down that tree (as you are doing) and find another way to get those pages out of the index.
You can use the URL removal request tool.
It only seems to allow you to remove 1000 per day.
I have done this before by automating the removal using a macro program.
I think I removed about 15,000 over the space of a month, doing that.
They are fairly fast at removing URLs these days, 24 hours or less.
-
Disallowing in your robots.txt keeps the bots from indexing your pages going forward, but Google may keep returning them in search results. This post has great explanations about ways to remove pages from indices: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
The surefire way to get them out of the index is to remove the disallow from your robots.txt, and add a meta noindex tags on all the pages you want removed. Once they're reindexed by Google, they'll no longer appear in SERPs.
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Google Analytics: how to filter out pages with low bounce rate?
Hello here, I am trying to find out how I can filter out pages in Google Analytics according to their bounce rate. The way I am doing now is the following: 1. I am working inside the Content > Site Content > Landing Pages report 2. Once there, I click the "advanced" link on the right of the filter field. 3. Once there, I define to "include" "Bounce Rate" "Greater than" "0.50" which should show me which pages have a bounce rate higher of 0.50%.... instead I get the following warning on the graph: "Search constraints on metrics can not be applied to this graph" I am afraid I am using the wrong approach... any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Should you stop indexing of short lived pages?
In my site there will be a lot of pages that have a short life span of about a week as they are items on sale, should I nofollow the links meaning the site has a fwe hundred pages or allow indexing and have thousands but then have lots of links to pages that do not exist. I would of course if allowing indexing make sure the page links does not error and sends them to a similarly relevant page but which is best for me with the SEarch Engines? I would like to have the option of loads of links with pages of loads of content but not if it is detrimental Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barney30120