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.
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
-
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google.
It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index.
I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
-
Hooray! Usually, I just give my advice and then run away, so it's always nice to hear I was actually right about something
Seriously, glad you got it sorted out.
-
Just a follow up to your suggestion.
I created sitemaps for the pages I want removed using the google spreadsheet importXML functions, which saved a lot of time.
It took a couple weeks but all of the pages, and similar pages, have successfully been removed from the index. Even the similar pages I didn't get a chance to put in the sitemap yet (importXML limits the results to 100).
Your suggestion worked!
-
I can't 404 dynamic search pages.
-
There are a mix of search pages and old mobile pages.
The search pages I've been testing out having the canonical point to the default search page. I've seen a slight drop in these pages - but I guess I just have to be more patient.
For the other pages the path is no longer there like you were mentioning. I like the idea of setting up the XML sitemap, I never even thought of making a bad/indexed page sitemap. I will give that a shot! Thankfully this will be a quick job with the importXml function in google spreadsheets! Great tip, hopefully it'll work.
-
Is there a crawl path to them currently? One issue I see a lot is that a bunch of pages get indexed, the path is found and cut off, NOINDEX (canonical, 301, etc.) is added, but then the pages never get re-crawled. Since they don't get recrawled, the page-level directive never gets honored.
If there's a URL parameter involved, you could use parameter-handling in GWT - it's not a perfect solution, but it sometimes seems to work without a re-crawl.
The other option would be to create a new XML sitemap with all of the bad/indexed URLs. This may push Google to re-crawl them and then see the tags to deindex. It's a bit safer than re-opening the crawl paths.
If they are being crawled and Google is just ignoring the NOINDEX for some reason, I'd try to 301 or canonical those pages to a primary search page, if that's feasible (probably canonical, since you don't want the users to 301). Sometimes, if a signal isn't working for that long, you just have to shake Google and try a different signal. Even following their exact recommendations, it rarely works as planned at large scale.
-
Don't use GWMT's removal tool to remove URLs which should not be in the index (unless those expose sensitive information). Best practise is to exclude them in robots.txt and to also ensure that the pages either 404 or have a noindex,noarchive tag.
-
Change the site structure and let the pages 404, Google will deindex them if they are not being linked to.
-
You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file. Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.
I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."
For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:
Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.php
That should work. If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.
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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0