Removing a Page From Google index
-
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
-
Thanks Ryan. I fully understand what you are saying and will be careful while making the change.
-
Hi Atul,
Generally speaking I am uncomfortable advising others on specific changes to the .htaccess file. If you make even a slight error while working with the file, your site security can be compromised, not to mention your SEO. There are also many factors to consider such as which mods are enabled on your particular server along with other configuration issues. Lastly, the order in which your code is placed in the file can effect it's operation so it's not like adding a meta tag to the section of an html document.
If you are on managed hosting, my recommendation is to ask your web host to make the change. If you are not on managed hosting, I recommend asking the developer who manages the site to make the change.
If you still insist on making the change yourself, try
Redirect gone /ABC/xyz.html
-
After reading your answer, i searched for methods on how to generate 410 error.
Lets say i want to remove a page named xyz.html.
Which of the following entry in .htaccess is correct
Redirect gone xyz.html
or
Redirect gone /xyz/
If xyz were in a folder named ABC,
would it be correct
Redirect gone /ABC/xyz.html
Thaks
-
Thanks everyone! We are just going to leave it as is. Google will eventually flush it out. Ryan - because of the 90 days we can't remove the URL's. I will need them back sooner than that when we actually put products in those states. Thanks again! helpful....as usual!
-
Remove URL tool will just expedite the inevitable. There is no downside in doing so.
I agree with everything you shared Esko up to this point. Aside from the time spent to remove the page, there is another downside. The URL you remove will not appear in SERPs again for 90 days after being manually removed.
If your URL was mysite.com/blue-widgets then your site will not have another /blue-widgets page listed again for 90 days. I can share it is a headache as an SEO trying to figure out why a page is not being indexed, and later learning I did not ask all the right questions i.e. "Prior to hiring my services, have you or anyone with access to your WMT account used the URL Removal tool within the past 90 days?". That otherwise obscure question now is asked regularly of my clients. Painful lesson.
Also, I wanted to share another helpful link I located from Google: When NOT to use the URL Removal tool.
-
Google will completely drop the page from the index after the next time they crawl it. Using the Remove URLs tool in Google Webmaster Tools will only expedite removal.
Best practice is to 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) the page first of all.
Remove URL tool will just expedite the inevitable. There is no downside in doing so.
-
Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
The best practice would be to generate a 410 error (GONE) for the pages and Google will remove them from their index fairly quickly.
The next best practice would be to leave the pages as 404s and Google will still remove them from their index but it will take a bit longer.
A 410 is used to inform Google and others the page is definitely gone. A 404 merely states the page is unavailable now. It could be available later.
The removal tool should only be used if it is a major concern for the search result to appear in SERPs. An example would be if confidential information was leaked.
-
I think it's always good to let Google know as they might remove it sooner. But there's no guarantee either way. Though if you can, you should 301 your content to a new/similar page rather than just let it 404.
-
I understand HOW to remove a page. I want to know whether it's better for me to manually remove it or let Google remove it on its own.
-
Remove a page from Google's Index
Use Google Webmaster Tools www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1663419
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
-
No images in Google index
No images are indexed on this site (client of ours): http://www.rubbermagazijn.nl/. We've tried everything (descriptive alt texts, image sitemaps, fetch&render, check robots) but a site:www.rubbermagazijn.nl shows 0 image results and the sitemap report in Search Console shows 0 images indexed. We're not sure how to proceed from here. Is there anyone with an idea what the problem could be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
Google Processing but Not Indexing XML Sitemap
Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange. I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern. Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has. The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning. Anyone know what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Google crawled my rich snippet pages and then excluded them
Hi guysWe have added schema.org mark up a few months ago and it all looked well and showed up then suddenly last month all the crawled pages disappeared from Webmaster tools Structured data (see the screenshot attached). This happened to another site of mine and I cannot figure out what causes it. Nothing has been changed on the pages and you can see by yourself in the HTML code. Any ideas to why this might happened this way?wenR89I.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Walltopia0 -
What may cause a page not to be indexed (be de-indexed)?
Hi All, I have a main category page, a landing page, that does not appear in the SERPS at all (even if I serach for a whole sentence from it). This page once ranked high. What may cause such a punishment for a specific page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Will Google Revisit a 403 Page
Hi, We've got some pretty strict anti-scraping logic in our website, and it seems we accidentally snared a Googlebot with it. About 100 URL requests were responded to with a 403 Forbidden error. The logic has since been updated, so this should not happen again. I was just wondering if/when Googlebot will come back and try those URLs again. They are linked from other pages on the site, and they are also in our sitemap. Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0