Send noindex, noarchive with 410?
-
My classifieds site returns a 410 along with an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header set to "noindex,noarchive" for vehicles that are no longer for sale. Google, however, apparently refuses to drop these vehicles from their index (at least as reported in GWT). By returning a "noindex,noarchive" directive, am I effectively telling the bots "yeah, this is a 410 but don't record the fact that this is a 410", thus effectively canceling out the intended effect of the 410?
-
That sounds good, let me know if you have further questions, I'm always glad to be of help!
-
Thanks for the info, mememax. I don't relish the thought of using the removal tool, but I suppose I can actually 301-redirect many of those 410s to category pages and then use the GWT for the rest.
-
hey Tony you made it in the right way, you added the error code + the noindex. However google won't drop your page from the index until it crawls it several times.
You can do this: first of all be sure that you have no links pointing to that page then:
- see in GWT if the page is showing as a 404 and when it will disappear from GWTools errors
- or go to GWT and ask google to remove it from the index. This is the fastest way, and google asks you to add a noindex or return a 404 to make this action, so actually you're more than fine to do that, however it depends on the volume of 404s you have this may be a huge and repetitive task to do.
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
-
Medium sizes forum with 1000's of thin content gallery pages. Disallow or noindex?
I have a forum at http://www.onedirection.net/forums/ which contains a gallery with 1000's of very thin-content pages. We've currently got these photo pages disallowed from the main googlebot via robots.txt, but we do all the Google images crawler access. Now I've been reading that we shouldn't really use disallow, and instead should add a noindex tag on the page itself. It's a little awkward to edit the source of the gallery pages (and keeping any amends the next time the forum software gets updated). Whats the best way of handling this? Chris.
Technical SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
Wordpress: Should your blog posts be noindex?
Wordpress defaults all blog posts to no index/nofollow Is this how it should be handled? I understand the nofollow from the page.com/blog to the page.com/blog/blogtitle But why noindex? We have Yoast installed and this is the default.
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
"noindex" internal search result urls
Hi, Would applying "noindex" on any page (say internal search pages) or blocking via robots text, skew up the internal site search stats in Google Analytics? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | RaksG0 -
How do I add "noindex" or "nofollow" to a link in Wordpress
It's been a while since I've SEOed a Wordpress site. How do I add "nofollow" or "noindex" to specific links? I highlight the anchor text in the text editor, I click the "link" button. I could have sworn that there used to be an option in the dialogue box that pops up.
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Timely use of robots.txt and meta noindex
Hi, I have been checking every possible resources for content removal, but I am still unsure on how to remove already indexed contents. When I use robots.txt alone, the urls will remain in the index, however no crawling budget is wasted on them, But still, e.g having 100,000+ completely identical login pages within the omitted results, might not mean anything good. When I use meta noindex alone, I keep my index clean, but also keep Googlebot busy with indexing these no-value pages. When I use robots.txt and meta noindex together for existing content, then I suggest Google, that please ignore my content, but at the same time, I restrict him from crawling the noindex tag. Robots.txt and url removal together still not a good solution, as I have failed to remove directories this way. It seems, that only exact urls could be removed like this. I need a clear solution, which solves both issues (index and crawling). What I try to do now, is the following: I remove these directories (one at a time to test the theory) from the robots.txt file, and at the same time, I add the meta noindex tag to all these pages within the directory. The indexed pages should start decreasing (while useless page crawling increasing), and once the number of these indexed pages are low or none, then I would put the directory back to robots.txt and keep the noindex on all of the pages within this directory. Can this work the way I imagine, or do you have a better way of doing so? Thank you in advance for all your help.
Technical SEO | | Dilbak0 -
Sitemaps and "noindex" pages
Experimenting a little bit to recover from Panda and added "noindex" tag for quite a few pages. Obviously now we need Google to re-crawl them ASAP and de-index. Should we leave these pages in sitemaps (with updated "lastmod") for that? Or just patiently wait? 🙂 What's the common/best way?
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Index or Noindex Wordpress Categories?
I've read a few different opinions on this, but I'm still unclear as to the best practice. I use my categories more like tags. Let's say I write a post about about seo, local marketing, and indexing. I would use the categories "seo"+"marketing"+"indexing". Therefore, that same post will show up in all three category pages. If these category pages are all set to be indexed, what impact does that have on my post being indexed? Should I noindex all of the categories except for the main ones to avoid too much duplicate content? Or do you recommend noindexing all of the categories? I know some seo plugins make this easy to do (I'm using Yoast). The only reason I'm hesitant to noindex all categories is because some of them rank well for their subject. I also already tried noindexing about a month ago and lost a lot of blog traffic, so I reversed it. Now some of my category pages have overtaken my post rankings, which makes it harder for the reader to find the content, but my overall blog traffic is back up. With my situation, what is the best thing to do long term? I just started using my blog a lot more so I want to know that I have it setup correctly. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
We are still seeing duplicate content on SEOmoz even though we have marked those pages as "noindex, follow." Any ideas why?
We have many pages on our website that have been set to "no index, follow." However, SEOmoz is indexing them as duplicate content. Why is that?
Technical SEO | | cmaseattle0