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Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
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Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list.
We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem:
- No index/archive to each login page
- Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines
- gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.)
Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines?
We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say:
"A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."
But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
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Yes thank you so much! I really appreciate it, made all the fixes now.
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You went one step too far by blocking the login pages in the robots.txt file, Tiffany.
You've put the no-index tag in the header of each login page, which is the right way to tell Google to remove the page from its index.
But by also blocking the subdomains in robots.txt, you've told the search engines not to spider the pages, so there's no way they can discover the no-index on the individual pages. They can't obey commands on pages they're told not to look at.
To be clear - a block in robots.txt does NOT tell the SEs to remove the pages, it just says "don't crawl them". You need to allow the pages to be crawled so the SEs can find and obey the no-index directive to remove them.
Doing that will just be a slower, though obviously much more automatic, way of accomplishing the same result as requesting a manual removal for each the URLs. Once you can see that all the subject URLs have fallen out of the index, you can reapply the robots.txt block to help save crawl budget, but keep the no-index meta-tags on each page as extra insurance.
Does that makes sense?
Paul
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