Why is google not deindexing pages with the meta noindex tag?

[JGar-220371]

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?

[NikolasNikolaou]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[JGar-220371]

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

[josh-riley]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[JGar-220371]

Ok.  That makes sense.  I wonder why it takes so long?  I'll start the long process of the manual removal.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[JGar-220371]

In your experience how long does this normally take?

[JGar-220371]

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.

[Matt-Williamson]

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

[StreamlineMetrics]

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

[mequedouno]

Or canonical or by robots.txt