Any way to force a URL out of Google index?
-
As far as I know, there is no way to truly FORCE a URL to be removed from Google's index. We have a page that is being stubborn. Even after it was 301 redirected to an internal secure page months ago and a noindex tag was placed on it in the backend, it still remains in the Google index.
I also submitted a request through the remove outdated content tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals and it said the content has been removed. My understanding though is that this only updates the cache to be consistent with the current index. So if it's still in the index, this will not remove it.
Just asking for confirmation - is there truly any way to force a URL out of the index? Or to even suggest more strongly that it be removed?
It's the first listing in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=hcahranswers&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS753US755&oq=hcahr&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60j0l3.1700j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
-
Thank you! The redirect was my suspicion as well. It's the last issue that could be causing this, thank you for affirming.
-
If a "removed" URL keeps popping up, something somewhere is linking to it. Your best bet would be to do some link sleuthing to find out where on the web the link to the old URL lives. If it's on one of your own sites, bingo, just remove it and it will drop away. If it's on an outside site, it's worth trying to contact that old site owner and see if they are willing to update the link.
When you say that you 301'd the old URL to an internal secure URL, does that mean Google can't access the replacement? That could be part of why you still have the problem. If you can 301 it to a new public page which then provides a short bit of content letting humans know there is a new page, and providing them with a link to the new page, then at least you'll be sending Google to a page it can index and also sending humans on to the new private page. This is actually the only case of Google not respecting a 301 I've experienced; as long as you 301 to a page they can at least crawl - even if they are told not to index it - they usually drop the old URL out of the index fairly quickly.
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
-
Why is Google no longer Indexing and Ranking my state pages with Dynamic Content?
Hi, We have some state specific pages that display dynamic content based on the state that is selected here. For example this page displays new york based content. But for some reason google is no longer ranking these pages. Instead it's defaulting to the page where you select the state here. But last year the individual state dynamic pages were ranking. The only change we made was move these pages from http to https. But now google isn't seeing these individual dynamically generated state based pages. When I do a site: url search it doesn't find any of these state pages. Any thoughts on why this is happening and how to fix it. Thanks in advance for any insight. Eddy By the way when I check these pages in google search console fetch as google, google is able to see these pages fine and they're not being blocked by any robot.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap0 -
Does Google index language flags/links in header, even if only 1 is visible at a time?
Hi, I want to pass link juice from my English website to my other languages. Does Google index language flags/links in header? Only 1 flag is visible at a time, and from what i´ve read, Google does not index content that is not visible to the user without clicks, like content behind tabs. I´m guessing language drop downs could fall under the same category as well...? Any knowledge on this... thank you for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidetoiceland0 -
How can Google index a page that it can't crawl completely?
I recently posted a question regarding a product page that appeared to have no content. [http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-ose-showing-now-data-for-this-url] What puzzles me is that this page got indexed anyway. Was it indexed based on Google knowing that there was once content on the page? Was it indexed based on the trust level of our root domain? What are your thoughts? I'm asking not only because I don't know the answer, but because I know the argument is going to be made that if Google indexed the page then it must have been crawlable...therefore we didn't really have a crawlability problem. Why Google index a page it can't crawl?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Google Maps Integration Dynamic url
We are integrating Google Maps into a search feature on a website. Would you use the standard dynamic generated long url that appears after a search or find a way of reducing this to a shorter url. Taking into account hundreds of results. Question asked for seo purposes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap errors for phantom urls?
Two weeks ago we changed our urls so the correct addresses are all lowercase. Everything else 301 redirects to those. We have submitted and made sure that Google has downloaded our updated sitemap several times since. Even so, Webmaster Tools is reporting 33000 + errors in our sitemap for urls that are no longer in our sitemap and haven't been for weeks. It claims to have found the errors within the last couple of days but the sitemap has been updated for a couple of weeks and has been downloaded by Google at least three times since. Here is our sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/urllist.xml Here are a couple of urls that Webmaster Tools says are in the sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Caroline-Gerhardinger-Large-Sterling-Silver-Medal/sku/78664
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot
Redirect error unavailable
Oct 7, 2011
http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Catherine-of-Bologna-Small-Gold-Filled-Medal/sku/78706
Redirect error unavailable
Oct 7, 20110 -
No index, follow vs. canonical url
We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos. Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc. We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard. Two solutions seem to stand out... Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages. However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index. (We are considering ruling this method out.) Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves. All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged. However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag. This has placed some doubt in our minds. I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0