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.
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
-
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt.
I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt).
What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login.
What is the next best solution?
-
I agree with Paul, The Google is re indexing the pages because you have few linking pointing back to these sub domains. The best idea us to restrict Google crawler by using no-index , no-follow tag and remove the instruction available in the robots.txt...
This way Google will neither crawl nor follow the activity on the page and it will get permanently remove from Google Index.
-
Yup - Chris has the solution. The robots.txt disallow directive simply instructs the crawler not to crawl, it doesn't have any instructions regarding removing URLs from the index. I'm betting there are other pages linking in to the subdomains that the bots are following to find and index as the URL Removal requests are expiring.
Do note though that when you add the no-index meta-robots tag, you're going to need to remove the robots.txt disallow directive. Otherwise the crawlers won't make any attempt to crawl all the pages and so won't even discover most of the no-index requests.
Paul
[Edited to add - there's no reason you can't implement the no-index meta-tags and then also again request removal via the Webmaster Tools removal tool. Kind of a "belt & suspenders approach. The removal request will get it out quicker, and the meta-no-index will do the job of keeping it out. Remember to do this in Bing Webmaster Tools as well.]
-
Wouldn't a noindex meta tag on each page take care of it?
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
-
Removing Toxic Back Links Targeting Obscure URL or Image
There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
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 -
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Best way to get pages indexed fast?
Any suggestion on best ways to get new sites pages indexed? Was thinking getting high pr inbound links on fiverr but always a little risky right? Thanks for your opinions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mweidner27820 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0