Google indexing site content that I did not wish to be indexed
-
Hi is it pretty standard for Google to index content that you have not specifically asked them to index i.e. provided them notification of a page's existence.
I have just been alerted by 'Mention' about some new content that they have discovered, the page is on our site yes and may be I should have set it to NO INDEX but the page only went up a couple of days ago and I was making it live so that someone could look at it and see how the page was going to look in its final iteration. Normally we go through the usual process of notifying Google via GWMT, adding it to our site map.xml file, publishing it via our G+ stream and so on.
Reviewing our Analytics it looks like there has been no traffic to this page yet and I know for a fact there are no links to this page. I am surprised at the speed of the indexation, is it a example of brand mention? Where an actual link is now no longer required?
Cheers
David
-
Thanks Candyman, yes this is not a question about to prevent Google for not indexing my content, I know this very well. It is more about how quick they have done this with the least amount of effort on our part to inform them.
Plus it is quite an interesting situation you found yourself in, never heard of this before.
Many thanks
David
-
Hi David-
We had a similar situation recently where we had a dev site and forgot to no-index it and actually started to appear in the SERPS. After a bit of puzzling it LOOKS like Google found (or at least indexed) the pages as a function of us being logged into our Google accounts when viewing them. We did not do extensive testing on this, its mostly anecdotal but ti did look like it was true. Maybe we'll do the experiment one day to be sure!
Ken
-
Google is constantly indexing and viewing your website. Why go through the other steps? To ensure that your new page isn't overlooked. While you don't necessarily need to tell Google to index in GWT - your site map should automatically update, and if referenced in the robots.txt file than the new page will be found without issue.
Now, again if you don't want a page indexed and it has links than you need to do the noindex / no follow on the page, as the robots.txt can be over-ruled.
-
Hi Samuel,
Thanks for replying but no I'm not asking that, this I know how to do. The question is about whether this could be seen as an example of page indexation where on my part there has been no explicit activity to inform Google of the content's existence and there are no links to it yet Google is still managing to index it. Why bother informing Google vIA some of the activities mentioned earlier when they will just index it anyway you know.
Thanks
David
-
Are you asking how to prevent certain pages from appearing in search results? If so, I'd review Moz's guide to robots.
Specifically, I'd recommend the use of both the noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file. Good luck!
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
-
If I have an https page with an http img that redirects to an https img, is it still considered by google to be a mixed content page?
With Google starting to crack down on mixed content I was wondering, if I have an https page with an http img that redirects to an https img, is it still considered by Google to be a mixed content page? e.g. In an old blog article, there are images that weren't updated when the blog migrated to https, but just 301ed to new https images. is it still considered a mixed content page?
Algorithm Updates | | David-Stern0 -
Google indexing https sites by default now, where's the Moz blog about it!
Hello and good morning / happy Friday! Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl. I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so. Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/ http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites. I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this. Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions: It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies. It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt. It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page. It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag. It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs. The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL. The server has a valid TLS certificate. One rule that confuses me a bit is : **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. ** Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Deacyde0 -
What are tips for ranking on Google Maps?
I have another thread going where everyone is saying to keep both the Places profile as well as the Google Plus Local profile I have for my company. I have another person telling me that it has a negative effect to have both accounts at the same time so I'm assuming thats why the listing never comes up on places unless you zoom all the way into the map to the address of the storefront. With that being said, can anyone provide some good tips for ranking first page on google maps? Goole Plus Local - https://plus.google.com/114370561649922317296/about?gl=us&hl=en Google Places - https://plus.google.com/103220086647895058915/about?gl=us&hl=en
Algorithm Updates | | jonnyholt1 -
Google Places/Points of Interest Rankings?
Does anyone have an idea on how Google ranks or determines the 'Points of Interests' that come up when searching about places/cities?
Algorithm Updates | | CarlLarson0 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Mobi sites and sitemaps
Hi all, How does should one treat mobi sites which have a separate set of files to the main site - with regards to the sitemap? Doe we tell Google about them?
Algorithm Updates | | gazza7770 -
Google dance/over optimized/paranoid?
Hi guys, hope your all OK and thanks in advance for taking a nosey at this. OK where to start - my rankings for the last 12 months have progressively improved every week, usually of the 300 KWs i track the last few months has seen approx 70 up/70down per week, but the improvements usually outweigh the declines. This week I saw a sudden drop though - 35 improvements and 112 declines. The strange thing was though, the improvements came on the more competitive KWs, and the less competitive words I haven't done much or any back linking for dropped. Seems silly me asking this question when I run that through my head ofcouse KWs you don;t work on will drop like flies? It should be plainly obvious those words would drop off but all have been improving on there own slowly over the last 6/7 months. Now if this was a penalty (nothing showing in webmaster tools) I would have expected it to come through on my KWs I have over done the backlinking for, but these are the 1's that improved. So is it just the Google Dance? I normally see some words such as the big 1 we target DJ Equipment go from position 13 - 24 can change hourly sometimes! Could it just be quite a few have dropped all at once and will pop back up this week? Also if anyone could give us any pointers in general on where you think we should be taking our SEO it would be much appreciated. I know we have been a little lazy with our backlinking and could do with some much better/ industry related websites linking to us, and there are title tags/metas on product page that need sorting.. aside these couple of issue's? DJs Only
Algorithm Updates | | allan-chris0 -
Is there a way to know what rank my site is listed on google ?
My current client web page was listed at the 4th page 1 month ago. Im trying real hard to make him understand that the traffic from beiing on the first page is important and that he need to give me additionnal ressource to make it happen ( i don't prog at all). So i had the idea of checking every page to see whats is current rank. but instead of looking from page 1 to page X, i was wondering if there was something somewhere that could give me my rank right away. It woud help saving time. Thx.
Algorithm Updates | | Promoteam0