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.
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
-
Hi all,
We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products.
Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers.
Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this:
- 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL.
- If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL.
- When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool
- This would be an example of an old URL:
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 - This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue
I have to specific questions:
- Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above?
- What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site".
And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business.Best regards,
TalkInThePark -
Thanks a lot, Tom. Time will tell...
Just one last thing:
what damage are you (and Google) thinking of when advising against removing URLs on a large scale through GWMT?Personally, I think Google says so only because they want to keep as much information possible in their index.
-
Thanks for the PM, I can now appreciate the problem a little more.
I think it's something that you should not rush. What you've done seems the best thing you can do for now.
Longer term, I'd look at your CMS options!
-
Yes, I have put a conditional meta robots "noindex" on all pages whose URL contains more than 2 GET elements. It is also present on URLs containing parameters of little or no SEO value (e.g. the "price" parameter).
Regarding the nofollow directive, my plan is to not put it in the head but on the individual links pointing to URLs that should not be indexed. If we happen to get a backlink to one of these noindexed pages, I want the link value to get passed on to listed product pages.
My big worrie is what should I do if this de-indexation process takes forever...
-
If you could put a conditional meta tag in to the source code, that will show the nofollow tag if the URL contains more than 3 GET elements, then that might help?
You seem to have already thought hard about your options, and they sound ok. Let's just wait to see whether any Gurus are about to shout stop!
-
Thanks for answering that quickly, Tom!
We cannot robots.txt disallow all URLs. We get quite a lot of organic traffic to these URLs. In july, organic traffic landing on results pages gave us approximately $85 000 in revenue. Also, what is good to know is that pages resulting from searching and browsing share the same URL - the search phrase is treated as just another filtering parameter in the URL.
Keeping the same URL structure is part of my preferred, 2-step solution:
- Meta Robots "noindex" unwanted results pages (the overwhelming majority)
- When our Google index has shrunken enough, put rel=nofollow on internal links pointing to those results pages in order to prevent bots from crawling them.
I have actually implemented step 1 (as of yesterday). The solution I was describing in my original post is my last resort solution. I wanted to get a professional opinion on that one in order to know if I should rule it out or not.
Unfortunately, I cannot disclose our company name here (I have a feeling our competitors use Seomoz as well :)). But I'll send you some links in a private message.
-
If I were you I'd keep the same URL structure. You're correct in thinking this won't be a quick fix.
First, use the robots.txt to disallow robots access to the search pages.
Don't remove all results just yet from GWT, this will be a long task and might damage your sites performance.
Could you provide some links to your site? I'll have a closer look.
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
-
Unsolved Why My site pages getting video index viewport issue?
Hello, I have been publishing a good number of blogs on my site Flooring Flow. Though, there's been an error of the video viewport on some of my articles. I have tried fixing it but the error is still showing in Google Search Console. Can anyone help me fix it out?
Technical SEO | | mitty270 -
How to index e-commerce marketplace product pages
Hello! We are an online marketplace that submitted our sitemap through Google Search Console 2 weeks ago. Although the sitemap has been submitted successfully, out of ~10000 links (we have ~10000 product pages), we only have 25 that have been indexed. I've attached images of the reasons given for not indexing the platform. gsc-dashboard-1 gsc-dashboard-2 How would we go about fixing this?
Technical SEO | | fbcosta0 -
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Does Google index internal anchors as separate pages?
Hi, Back in September, I added a function that sets an anchor on each subheading (h[2-6]) and creates a Table of content that links to each of those anchors. These anchors did show up in the SERPs as JumpTo Links. Fine. Back then I also changed the canonicals to a slightly different structur and meanwhile there was some massive increase in the number of indexed pages - WAY over the top - which has since been fixed by removing (410) a complete section of the site. However ... there are still ~34.000 pages indexed to what really are more like 4.000 plus (all properly canonicalised). Naturally I am wondering, what google thinks it is indexing. The number is just way of and quite inexplainable. So I was wondering: Does Google save JumpTo links as unique pages? Also, does anybody know any method of actually getting all the pages in the google index? (Not actually existing sites via Screaming Frog etc, but actual pages in the index - all methods I found sadly do not work.) Finally: Does somebody have any other explanation for the incongruency in indexed vs. actual pages? Thanks for your replies! Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Investigating a huge spike in indexed pages
I've noticed an enormous spike in pages indexed through WMT in the last week. Now I know WMT can be a bit (OK, a lot) off base in its reporting but this was pretty hard to explain. See, we're in the middle of a huge campaign against dupe content and we've put a number of measures in place to fight it. For example: Implemented a strong canonicalization effort NOINDEX'd content we know to be duplicate programatically Are currently fixing true duplicate content issues through rewriting titles, desc etc. So I was pretty surprised to see the blow-up. Any ideas as to what else might cause such a counter intuitive trend? Has anyone else see Google do something that suddenly gloms onto a bunch of phantom pages?
Technical SEO | | farbeseo0 -
Getting Pages Indexed That Are Not In The Main Navigation
Hi All, Hoping you can help me out with a couple of questions I have. I am looking to create SEO friendly landing pages optimized for long tail keywords to increase site traffic and conversions. These pages will not live on the main navigation. I am wondering what the best way to get these pages indexed is? Internal text linking, adding to the sitemap? What have you done in this situation? I know that these pages cannot be orphaned pages and they need to be linked to somewhere. Looking for some tips to do this properly and to ensure that they can become indexed. Thanks! Pat
Technical SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
How to block "print" pages from indexing
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search. Can you recommend a way to block this from happening? Example Article: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html Example "Print" page: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0