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.
How long til meta robots noindex takes effect?
-
I have a wordpress site with about 3,000 posts and over 1,000 tags. All of the tag archives are currently indexed in Google and I don't want them to be.
I just set the meta robots to no-index all the tag archives and was wondering how long it will take til they're out of the search engines?
Since there are close to 1,500 of these and they are duplicate content it would be nice to have them gone asap.
I noticed Webmaster Tools allows me to resubmit my site to index if my site has changed significantly... should I try that??
Any other advice would be greatly appreciated!
-
Thanks for the responses! The pages just got noindexed today... it took almost exactly a week.
-
I personally would update your robots.txt and then submit a sitemap with the URLs in question via GWMT - this will result in your pages being crawled very quickly (within 48 hours) and then dropped out.
I would also look at either using 301's if you see link-juice from those URLs or using 404s/410s.
I personally found that resubmitting takes longer than pushing an updated sitemap.
-
There's no set time, typically it can take a week or two, I've seen it take a month or longer though to completely noindex all desired results on bigger sites.
There's no harm in re-submtting the site, try submitting URL and all linked pages via webmaster tools, it may help get crawled a little faster.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Explore more categories
-
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
-