Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. How do you de-index and prevent indexation of a whole domain?

    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.

    How do you de-index and prevent indexation of a whole domain?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    3
    1134
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Martin_S
      Martin_S last edited by

      I have parts of an online portal displaying in SERPs which it definitely shouldn't be. It's due to thoughtless developers but I need to have the whole portal's domain de-indexed and prevented from future indexing.

      I'm not too tech savvy but how is this achieved? No index? Robots?

      thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • SebastianCowie
        SebastianCowie last edited by

        Fastest way to do it would be through a combination of Google Webmaster Tools and Robots.txt / noindex,nofollow meta tags.

        Firstly if your domain hasn't been verified within GWT, go through that process. Then proceed with the remove URL request within GWT. (Image Attached)

        You will need to upload a robots.txt and/or implement the noindex meta tag within the header of the pages you no longer want indexed.

        Example Robots.txt:

        User-agent: *
        Disallow: /offendingportal/

        Example Robots Meta tag:

        That should be enough to get rid of the offending content from within the SERPS and prevent it from being re-indexed.

        removeurl.png

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Martijn_Scheijbeler
          Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

          Hi TCE,

          There are two options in my opinion for this which are the best (as their are several other options including META robots etc):

          1. Robots.txt: Exclude your portal via your robots.txt file.
          2. HTTP Auth: Let your developers add HTTP Authentication so you have to log in to see the portal. Google won't be able to see the pages itself and so will de index them.

          Hope this helps.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • Bee159

            :Pointing hreflang to a different domain

            Hi all, Let's say I have two websites: www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.de - they share a lot of content but the main categories and URLs are almost always different. Am I right in saying I can't just set the hreflang tag on every page of www.mywebsite.com to read: rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de' /> That just won't do anything, right? Am I also right in saying that the only way to use hreflang properly across two domains is to have a customer hreflang tag on every page that has identical content translated into German? So for this page: www.mywebsite.com/page.html my hreflang tag for the german users would be: <link < span="">rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de/page.html' /></link <> Thanks for your time.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
            0
          • Locals

            Primary Domain or Redirect?

            We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals
            0
          • BrandLabs

            Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain

            I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past  years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs
            0
          • optimalwebinc

            Why does a site have no domain authority?

            A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1.  When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc
            0
          • Ouzan

            Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain

            Hi, My programmer recently did a horrible mistkae by adding noindex, nofollow to our website without me noticing for two days. At the same time he did it we bought a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new domain: The Old domain is: http://www.websitebuildersworld.com and the new one is: http://www.websiteplanet.com Now unfortunatly I didn't notice the noindex,nofollow when it was on the old domain and I redirected it to websiteplanet.com before I fixed the noindex, nofollow. I fixed the problem around 10 hours ago on the new domain (www.websiteplanet.com) but the old domain didn't get indexed back (yet), so for example if you search for WebsiteBuildersWorld in google you will not reach the homepage as google deleted it because of the noindex,nofollow. My question is:
            Do you think that it will be fixed and google will retrieve websitebuildersworld homepage to his search results and then redirect it to websiteplanet? Or because I redirected websitebuildersworld.com to websiteplanet.com before letting google crawling websitebuildersworld.com without the noindex,no follow it wouldn't get indexed again? I hope I explained the problem good enough. Looking forward for your valuable replies. Thanks.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
            0
          • seoppc2012

            Does Google index url with hashtags?

            We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc2012
            0
          • AdeLewis

            How long should a domain redirect take?

            Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
            Ade.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
            0
          • CareerBliss

            Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?

            We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.