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.
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
-
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed.
From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else.
I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html
Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
-
Thanks, Logan!
-
Rhys,
Your web dev team is confused. You cannot de-index by simply disallowing them in your robots.txt file. Google will still index anything they find (that doesn't have a noindex tag) from a link, this is the reason you often see search results that say "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" as the description.
Here's a quote from Google regarding the subject: "You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results." - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
-
Hi all,
Sorry to jump in here but I've been told the opposite by our web dev team. We're removing indexed 404s at the moment, and our web dev team said we simply need to add robots.txt to the pages and they'll be de-indexed. If this incorrect? I thought I'd need to add a noindex tag but was argued down...
Cheers,
Rhys
-
Hi there. Good question and one that comes up a lot.
You need to do the following:
- Put the noindex on those pages
- Remove the block in robots.txt
- Monitor these pages falling out of the index
- Once they are all out, then put the block back in place
You both want them to a) drop out and b) then not be crawled, so the above will take care of that for you.
Hope that helps!
John
-
Thanks.
That is what I figured just wanted to double check.
-
Hi Tyler,
Yes, remove the robots.txt disallow for that section and add a noindex tag. Noindex is the only sure-fire way to de-index URLs, but the crawlers need to be allowed to crawl those pages to see the tag.
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
Page with metatag noindex is STILL being indexed?!
Hi Mozers, There are over 200 pages from our site that have a meta tag "noindex" but are STILL being indexed. What else can I do to remove them from the Index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
How long to re-index a page after being blocked
Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site? If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine A. block it out in the robot.txt B. let it 404
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0