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
-
Does Google like pricing information?
Over the last year I have noticed a trend in a couple of industries. Google seems to prioritise landing pages with pricing information in the content. This seems more important than it used to. One industry is high end industrial machines. Traditionally there isn't a price list as everything is bespoke for the customer. Low end machines that display an off the shelf price are now ranking higher than they used to. This is frustrating because the different machines meet different customer requirements. However, both sorts of customers are likely to use the same search terms. Has anyone else noticed this trend?
Algorithm Updates | | Brighton-Soundsystem0 -
Site titles / descriptions change - Google Algo Change ?
Hello, During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
Algorithm Updates | | lordish
They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this. can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here? sites:
http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
http://www.gossipbingo.com
http://www.moonbingo.com in the attached examples:
for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions. results for these pages:
moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php rhMzURw.png 2tRL5dZ.png0 -
How do you get great content for a small business?
We always talk about great engaging content being the way forwards for sites. As a small business this is an expensive commodity to outsource when you have probably in the region of 250 pages that could probably all use some work. To that end I have some questions. how do do you make a product or category description engaging? Should they still contain a certain number of words ( personally I hate ready reams of text) As on-page SEO what should we be striving to achieve? I am sure this has all been asked before but what the general consensus right now?
Algorithm Updates | | Towelsrus0 -
Which Google Snippet to use? Products or Review
A "product" page that includes "user reviews/ratings" and "comparison prices", which Google snippet do/should you use? Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | righty0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0 -
Accidently blocked our site for an evening?
Yesterday at about 5pm I switched our site to a new server and accidentally blocked our site from google for the evening. our domain is posnation.com and we are ranked in the top 3 in almost all pos related keywords. When i got in this morning i realized the mistake and went to google web tools and noticed the site was blocked so i went to fetch as google bot and corrected that. Now the message says: Check to see that your robots.txt is working as expected. (Any changes you make to the robots.txt content below will not be saved.)
Algorithm Updates | | POSNation
robots.txt file Downloaded Status
http://www.posnation.com/robots.txt 1 hours ago 200 (Success) When you go to google and type "pos systems" we are still #2 so i assume all is still ok. My question is will this potentially hurt our rankings and should i be worried and is there anything else I can do.0 -
Removing secure subdomain from google index
we've noticed over the last few months that Google is not honoring our main website's robots.txt file. We have added rules to disallow secure pages such as: Disallow: /login.cgis Disallow: /logout.cgis Disallow: /password.cgis Disallow: /customer/* We have noticed that google is crawling these secure pages and then duplicating our complete ecommerce website across our secure subdomain in the google index (duplicate content) https://secure.domain.com/etc. Our webmaster recently implemented a specific robots.txt file for the secure subdomain disallow all however, these duplicated secure pages remain in the index. User-agent: *
Algorithm Updates | | marketing_zoovy.com
Disallow: / My question is should i request Google to remove these secure urls through Google Webmaster Tools? If so, is there any potential risk to my main ecommerce website? We have 8,700 pages currently indexed into google and would not want to risk any ill effects to our website. How would I submit this request in the URL Removal tools specifically? would inputting https://secure.domain.com/ cover all of the urls? We do not want any secure pages being indexed to the index and all secure pages are served on the secure.domain example. Please private message me for specific details if you'd like to see an example. Thank you,0 -
Question relates to mobile site & duplicate content.
We are working on the mobile version of a large site (migraine.com) and will be using a separate theme for it (directing visitors to m.migraine.com)- what are the necessary code or other important step we should take so that we do get penalized for having duplicate content? Thank you in advance for your responses
Algorithm Updates | | OlivierChateau0