Why is google not deindexing pages with the meta noindex tag?
-
On our website www.keystonepetplace.com we added the meta noindex tag to category pages that were created by the sorting function.
Google no longer seems to be adding more of these pages to the index, but the pages that were already added are still in the index when I check via site:keystonepetplace.com
Here is an example page: http://www.keystonepetplace.com/dog/dog-food?limit=50
How long should it take for these pages to disappear from the index?
-
Google might have already crawled the pages but not indexed them yet. Be patient , if you have enough links coming in and the pages are less than 3 levels deep they will all be crawled and indexed in no time.
-
I guess it depends on the urgency of your situation. If you were just trying to clean things up then it's okay to wait for Google to re-crawl and solve the problem. But if you have been affected by panda and your site is not ranking then I personally would consider that an urgent enough need to use the tool.
-
This link almost makes it seem like I shouldn't use the webmaster tools removal.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119
-
The crawlers have so many billions of webpages to get to. We have more than 50,000 on our site; there's about 8,000 that they check more regularly than the others - some are just really deep on the site and hard to get to.
-
You can remove entire category directories from the index in one command using the tool. But the urls won't be removed from the cache, just the index. To remove them from the cache you'll need to enter each url individually. I think that if you are trying to clear things up for Panda reasons, just removing from the index is enough. However, I'm currently trying to decide if it will speed things up to remove from the cache as well.
-
Ok. That makes sense. I wonder why it takes so long? I'll start the long process of the manual removal.
-
Streamline Metrics has got it right.
I've seen pages take MONTHS to drop out of the index after being noindexed. It's best to use the URL removal tool in WMT (not to be confused with the disavow tool) to tell Google to not only deindex the pages but to remove them from the cache as well. I have found that when you do this the pages are gone within 12 hours.
-
In your experience how long does this normally take?
-
Yes it was around December 2nd or 3rd that we added the noindex tags. It just seemed like google wasn't removing any pages yet from the index. It did stop google from adding more of these pages though.
-
It all depends on how long it takes Google to re-crawl those pages with the no index tag on them.
I would do this along with the steps you have already taken in order to help speed the process up if you are in a hurry
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663419
-
Do you know when you added the noindex tags? Google will need to recrawl the pages to see the noindex tags before removing them. I just looked at one your category pages and it looks like it was cached by Google on December 1st, and there was no noindex tag on that page. Depending on how big your site is and how often your site is crawled will determine when they will be removed from the index. Here's Google's official explanation -
"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results.
Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there's a small chance that Googlebot won't see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it's probably because we haven't crawled your site since you added the tag. (Also, if you've used your robots.txt file to block this page, we won't be able to see the tag either.)
If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. To expedite removal, use the URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
-
Or canonical or by robots.txt
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
-
Google page speed testing failures
When running our domain through google's page speed insights I'm getting the error message 'An error occurred while fetching or analyzing the page' at around 65% load. I'm concerned it's affecting our organic rankings. The domain is https://www.scottscastles.com/ When testing in https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/ it is also failing at around 70% with the message 'It's taking longer than expected. You can leave this tab open and check back in a little while. We'll have your results soon.' but the results never come. I've tried testing on a few different speed testing sites without failures (https://tools.pingdom.com, https://gtmetrix.com, https://www.webpagetest.org and a few others). We’re stumped as everything appears correct and was working but now isn't. Is this Google or us, or a combination of the two? Any help greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
Google Results Title vs My Page Title
I'm having some trouble with my titles of a new site, it has been online for around two months now and i'm getting weird titles from most indexed pages. Since my site is focused on finding courses, the course title format is the following: URL: https://www.maseducacion.com/estudios/programacion-curricular--tecnigrap-2982
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ
My Title: Course - Institute | Mybrand
Google Search Title: Course - Institute | Mybrand - Educativa Half of my results have that word at the end, don't know where it comes from, that word is only included in two links. Any idea on how to fix it?0 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
Miss meta description on 404 page
Hi, My 404 page did not have meta description. Is it an error? Because I run report and seomoz said that a problem. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Google truncating or altering meta title - affect rankings?
I have a site that the title tag is too long and the title is simply the name of the site (I think they get it from ODP, not sure) Anyway, the rankings for the home page have dropped quite a bit. I'm wondering if the change that Google makes affects rankings (i.e. name of site doesn't have all the keywords).
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
2000 pages indexed in Yahoo, 0 in Google. NO PR, What is wrong?
Hello Everyone, I have a friend with a blog site that has over 2000 pages indexed in Yahoo but none in Google and no page rank. The web site is http://www.livingorganicnews.com/ I know it is not the best site but I am guessing something is wrong and I don't see it. Can you spot it? Does he have some settings wrong? What should he do? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | QuietProgress0 -
Why does our page show a description in english in google spain?
Hi! We have a multilingual page and I have set in Google Webmaster Tools the language preference for the root domain to be none, Spanish for the .com/es, English for the .com/en, and German for the .com/de. The title and description show in the right language in Google Germany and google UK, but in google.es (Spain) the title and description appear in English instead of Spanish. Does anybody know why could this be happening and how to fix it? kJtF3.png
Technical SEO | | inmonova0