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
-
Remove Product & Category from URLS in Wordpress
Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please. https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.
My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO. Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd1 -
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!9