Remove internal site SERPS from Google Index?
-
1. Internal Serp pages did not have a robots meta tag
2. As a result, client site has thousands (~4,400) of internal site SERP pages in the Google index.
3. We added the NoIndex, Follow attribute to all internal SERPS
4. We Disallowed: domain.com/internal-search-operator in Robots.txt
5. No new SERP pages are being indexed, but the other 4000 something that were already there are still in the index weeks later.
6. The pages are dynamically created and still work, so I can't use the Remove Content tool from google, because the pages don't 404.
Is there any way to get these pages out of the index besides just waiting and hoping google eventuall drops them?
Thanks
-
You can still submit a url removal request from GWT, because it checks for 1 of 3 things:
- 404 header response code
- NOINDEX meta tag
- Robots.txt disallow rule
So even if its not 404 Google will still do the removal.
-
You can create a formal request to Google using Webmaster Tools and tell them the URLs or list of URLs that you'd like removed from the index. Whether or not they actually remove them is a completely different story.
-
I should have explained it what I meant by SERPS better.
These pages are generated by doing a text search on the site. (Magento) So yes, they are product listings, but obviously most queries are different, so the dynamically created pages are all unique but useless.
Thanks for the idea about rel=canonical them back to the search page - I will look into that.
-
Note: By SERPs I'm assuming you're referring to Search Results within the site (e.g. a product listing) and not actual Google SERPs.
If so, it sounds like it could be a case for canonical. If the pages are all site.com/search.htm?searchterm=xxxx&page=y&rows=100 kind of thing you could canonical them all back down to search.htm.
If you're not familiar with canonical here's a YouMoz post that explains it pretty well:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
Based on my experience in the past the canonicalized pages will eventually 'disappear' from the index (not really, but Google doesn't display them anymore) in time. They would also eventually fall out already with what you've done in regards to noindex no follow etc., but I've found it takes longer.
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
-
Need Professional Help with Site Structure, Page Authority, and Internal Linking
We are a 10 year + small (1000 pages) niche ecommerce site (Magento) that has recently lost rankings to a competitor. We out perform them in every metric so I do not understand them leap frogging us to the top spot. This has forced me to look at my site structure, page authority (rank), and internal linking. After reviewing a moz crawl issues report, here are some of my observations: Root domain has a PA of 40 Top 3 $ Category pages have a PA of 22, 18, 18 Multiple meaningless blog posts and other category/product pages have PA’s of 30+ Here is a screenshot of the crawl report with internal links, links, etc showing. I need some help - thoughts, suggestions, next steps in analysis?
On-Page Optimization | | SammyT0 -
Site Wide Links
Howdy Moz! So our agency has been around for long enough to have a few sites we've built that have our credit in their footer resulting in a site wide link. Mostly just our name. We've heard that Google does not particularly like site wide links, should we go through and remove some of these old links?
On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
Two sites into one
I have two sites owned by one client, he wants to merge them into one keeping one website, but which one? I've been using the Moz Pro to look at the stats for both sites; page authority, inbound links etc, but they're both fairly close in results. The client wants to know what would be the best course to take with these two sites, what site should he keep and which should he merge? Any advice?
On-Page Optimization | | barrowr0 -
Multiple Organization Schema on the same site
I creating a preferred supplier list on my site and wanted to use the Organization Schema for the company details. Is there a issue with having more than one org schema on the same site? or should I just use the one for my company. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | gregdicksonuk1 -
On site SEO review please
I'd appreciate it its anyone could take the time to review my on site SEO and suggest improvements. it's an adult dating site at http://www.local-sex-search. All pages can be found at http://www.local-sex-search.com/sitemap
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Google indexing https insted of http pages
Hi!
On-Page Optimization | | ovieira
First of all i have a Wordpress portuguese languagem website (**http://**bit.ly/TGjpVx). For a while, for security pourposes, i had a SSL certificate installed on my website but i didn't renew it, for a few months now. I didn't have any special https page. All pages responded using http or https. My problem is that it seems that Google still indexes some o my webpages with https and not http, so when people click on it they get a bad cached page. No good for SEO, i think. What can i do about this? I only want Google, and other serach engines, to index my clean http pages (about 70 pages). Thanks,
OV0 -
Prevent indexing of dynamic content
Hi folks! I discovered bit of an issue with a client's site. Primarily, the site consists of static html pages, however, within one page (a car photo gallery), a line of php coding: dynamically generates a 100 or so pages comprising the photo gallery - all with the same page title and meta description. The photo gallery script resides in the /gallery folder, which I attempted to block via robots.txt - to no avail. My next step will be to include a: within the head section of the html page, but I am wondering if this will stop the bots dead in their tracks or will they still be able to pick-up on the pages generated by the call to the php script residing a bit further down on the page? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | SCW0 -
On my site, www.myagingfolks.com, only a small number of my pages appear to be indexed by google or yahoo. Is that due to not having an XML sitemap, keywords, or some other problem?
On my site, www.myagingfolks.com, only a small number of my pages appear to be indexed by google or yahoo. I have thousands of pages! Is that due to not having an XML sitemap, keywords, or some other problem?
On-Page Optimization | | Jordanrg0