How best to deindex tens of thousands of pages?

[SteveW1987]

Hi there,

We run a quotes based site and so have hundreds of thousands of pages. We released a batch of pages (around 2500) and they ranked really well. Encouraged by this we released the remaining ~300,000 pages in just a couple of days. These have been indexed but are not ranking any where. We presume this is because we released too much too quickly. So we want to roll back what we've done and release them in smaller batches.

So I wondered if:

1. Can we de-index thousands of pages, and if so what's the best way of doing this?

2. Can we then re-index these pages but over a much greater time period without changing the pages at all - or would we need to change the pages/the URL's etc?

thanks!

Steve

[vcj]

I suppose you could also try creating a page that had links to all of the pages you want to noindex, then from Search Console use the Fetch as Google tool to fetch that page and choose the "Crawl this URL and its direct links" option to help Google see the noindex meta tags faster.

[SteveW1987]

Great, thanks for this. Will look into this and probably give it a go.

[vcj]

You could add meta robots noindex to those pages and wait for Google to crawl them again and possibly remove them from the index. You can't simply remove them all from the index in one go.