How can I get unimportant pages out of Google?
-
Hi Guys,
I have a (newbie) question, untill recently I didn't had my robot.txt written properly so Google indexed around 1900 pages of my site, but only 380 pages are real pages, the rest are all /tag/ or /comment/ pages from my blog. I now have setup the sitemap and the robot.txt properly but how can I get the other pages out of Google? Is there a trick or will it just take a little time for Google to take out the pages?
Thanks!
Ramon
-
If you want to remove an entire directory, you can exclude that directory in robots.txt, then go to Google Webmaster Tools and request a URL removal. You'll have an option to remove an entire directory there.
-
No, sorry. What I said is, if you mark the folder as disalow in robots.txt, it will not remove the pages are already indexed.
But the meta tag, when the spiders go again on the page and see that the pages are with the noindex tag will remove it.
Since you can not already include the directory on the robots.txt. Before removing the SE pages.
First you put the noindex tag on all pages you want to remove. After they are removed, it takes a week for a month. After you add the folders in robots.txt to your site who do not want to index.
After that, you dont need to worry about the tags.
I say this because when you add in the robots.txt first, the SE does not read the page anymore, so they would not read the meta noindex tag. Therefore you must first remove the pages with noindex tag and then add in robot.txt
Hope this has helped.
João Vargas
-
No, sorry. What I said is, if you mark the folder as disalow in robots.txt, it will not remove the pages are already indexed.
But the meta tag, when the spiders go again on the page and see that the pages are with the noindex tag will remove it.
Since you can not already include the directory on the robots.txt. Before removing the SE pages.
First you put the noindex tag on all pages you want to remove. After they are removed, it takes a week for a month. After you add the folders in robots.txt to your site who do not want to index.
After that, you dont need to worry about the tags.
I say this because when you add in the robots.txt first, the SE does not read the page anymore, so they would not read the meta noindex tag. Therefore you must first remove the pages with noindex tag and then add in robot.txt
Hope this has helped.
João Vargas
-
Thanks Vargas, If I choose for noindex, I should remove it from the robot.txt right?
I understood that if you have a noindex tag on the page and as well a dissallow in the robot.txt the SE will index it, is that true?
-
For you remove the pages you want, need to put a tag:
<meta< span="">name="robots" content="noindex">If you want internal links and external relevance to pass on these pages, you put:
<meta< span="">name="robots" content="noindex, follow">If you do the lock on robot.txt: only need to include the tag in the current urls, new search engines will index no.
In my opinion, I do not like using the google url remover. Because if someday you want to index these folders, will not, at least it has happened to me.
The noindex tag works very well to remove objectionable content, within 1 month or so now will be removed.</meta<></meta<>
-
Yes. It's only a secondary level aid, and not guaranteed, yet it could help speed up the process of devaluing those pages in Google's internal system. If the system sees those, and cross-references to the robots.txt file it could help.
-
Thanks guys for your answers....
Alan, do you mean that I place the tag below at all the pages that I want out of Google? -
I agree with Alan's reply. Try canonical 1st. If you don't see any change, remove the URLs in GWT.
-
There's no bulk page request form so you'd need to submit every URL one at a time, and even then it's not a guaranteed way. You could consider gettting a canonical tag on those specific pages that provides a different URL from your blog, such as an appropriate category page, or the blog home page. That could help speed things up, but canonical tags themselves are only "hints" to Google.
Ultimately it's a time and patience thing.
-
It will take time, but you can help it along by using the url removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
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
-
Site's meta description is not being shown in Google Search results. Instead our privacy policy is getting indexed.
We re-launched our new site and put in the re-directs. Our site is https://www.fico.com/en. When I search for "fico" in Google. I see the privacy policy getting indexed as meta descriptions instead of our actual meta description. I have edited the meta description, requested Google to re-index our site. Not sure what to do next? Thanks for your advise.
Technical SEO | | gosheen0 -
Having trouble getting listed on Google News
My friend has a site: http://www.behindthehedges.com/ and is having trouble getting accepted into Google News. I read over the technical guidelines and best practices listed on Google's site. It appears they have everything covered. However, they keep getting rejected. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Can Google index the text content in a PDF?
I really really thought the answer was always no. There's plenty of other things you can do to improve search visibility for a PDF, but I thought the nature of the file type made the content itself not-parsable by search engine crawlers... But now, my client's competitor is ranking for my client's brand name with a PDF that contains comparison content. Thing is, my client's brand isn't in the title, the alt-text, the url... it's only in the actual text of the PDF. Did I miss a major update? Did I always have this wrong?
Technical SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Google Cache can't keep up with my 403s
Hi Mozzers, I hope everyone is well. I'm having a problem with my website and 403 errors shown in Google Webmaster Tools. The problem comes because we "unpublish" one of the thousands of listings on the site every few days - this then creates a link that gives a 403. At the same time we also run some code that takes away any links to these pages. So far so good. Unfortunately Google doesn't notice that we have removed these internal links and so tries to access these pages again. This results in a 403. These errors show up in Google Webmaster Tools and when I click on "Linked From" I can verify that that there are no links to the 403 page - it's just Google's Cache being slow. My question is a) How much is this hurting me? b) Can I fix it? All suggestions welcome and thanks for any answers!
Technical SEO | | HireSpace1 -
Does google know every time you change content on your page
What i mean by the question is, so on our home page www.in2town.co.uk we change the article under lifestyle story of the day, if this changes every hour, will this encourage google to visit that page more often or will then just ignore that and just visit each day would love to hear your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
I need help compiling solid documentation and data (if possible) that having tons of orphaned pages is bad for SEO - Can you help?
I spent an hour this afternoon trying to convince my CEO that having thousands of orphaned pages is bad for SEO. His argument was "If they aren't indexed, then I don't see how it can be a problem." Despite my best efforts to convince him that thousands of them ARE indexed, he simply said "Unless you can prove it's bad and prove what benefit the site would get out of cleaning them up, I don't see it as a priority." So, I am turning to all you brilliant folks here in Q & A and asking for help...and some words of encouragement would be nice today too 🙂 Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Can I optimize two different pages with very similar keywords without hurting SEO?
Hi there, I have often heard that you cannot have multiple pages rank for the same keyword. My question here is more about long tail keywords who have the same keyword phrase repeated on different pages. For Example: I have two webpages with different content. I want to have one page (Homepage) rank for the more generic term such as "innovation management" and another supporting page rank for "innovation management software". Will Google see these two different webpages as competing? Should I avoid repeating the more general term in the phrase? Has anyone ever seen your SEO results decline when doing this? I don't believe this is duplicate content since the pages hold completely different copy and assets but I am not sure if the repeating phrase in the title tags will flag anything to the search engines.
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Why this page doesn't get indexed?
Hi, I've just taken over development and SEO for a site and we're having difficulty getting some key pages indexed on our site. They are two clicks away from the homepage, but still not getting indexed. They are recently created pages, with unique content on. The architecture looks like this:Homepage >> Car page >> Engine specific pageWhenever we add a new car, we link to its 'Car page' and it gets indexed very quickly. However the 'Engine pages' for that car don't get indexed, even after a couple of weeks. An example of one of these index pages are - http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/car-reviews/Volkswagen/Beetle-New/2.0-TSISo, things we've checked - 1. Yes, it's not blocked by robots.txt2. Yes, it's in the sitemap (http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/sitemap.xml)3. Yes, it's viewable to search spiders (e.g. the link is present in the html source)This page doesn't have a huge amount of unique content. We're a review aggregator, but it still does have some. Any suggestions as to why it isn't indexed?Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | soulnafein0