I have removed over 2000+ pages but Google still says i have 3000+ pages indexed
-
Good Afternoon,
I run a office equipment website called top4office.co.uk.
My predecessor decided that he would make an exact copy of the content on our existing site top4office.com and place it on the top4office.co.uk domain which included over 2k of thin pages.
Since coming in i have hired a copywriter who has rewritten all the important content and I have removed over 2k pages of thin pages.
I have set up 301's and blocked the thin pages using robots.txt and then used Google's removal tool to remove the pages from the index which was successfully done.
But, although they were removed and can now longer be found in Google, when i use site:top4office.co.uk i still have over 3k of indexed pages (Originally i had 3700).
Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and more importantly how i can fix it?
Our ranking on this site is woeful in comparison to what it was in 2011. I have a deadline and was wondering how quickly, in your opinion, do you think all these changes will impact my SERPs rankings?
Look forward to your responses!
-
I agree with DrPete. You cant have the pages within the robot.txt otherwise Google will not crawl the pages and "see" the 301s to then update the index.
Something else to consider is on the new pages, have them canonical to themselves. We had a site that Google was caching old URLs that had 301 redirects that had been up for 2 years. Google was finding the new pages and new titles and new content, but were referencing the old URLs. We were seeing this in the SERPs and also in the GWT. GWT was reporting duplicate content for titles and descriptions for sets of pages that were 301ed. Adding the canonical to self helped get that cleaned up.
Cheers.
-
This process can take a painfully long time, even done right, but I do have a couple of concerns:
(1) Assuming I understand the situation, I think using Robots.txt on top of 301-redirects is a bad idea. If Google doesn't recrawl the pages, they won't process the 301s, and Robots.txt is bad for removal (good for prevention, but not once something is in the index). Basically, you're telling Google not to re-crawl these pages, and if they don't re-crawl, they won't process the 301s. So, I'd drop the Robots.txt blocking for now, honestly.
(2) What's your internationalization strategy? You could potential try rel="alternate"/hreflang to specify US vs. UK English, target each domain in webmaster tools, and leave the duplicates alone. If you 301-redirect, you're not giving the UK site a chance to rank properly on Google.co.uk (if that's your objective).
-
It sounds like you have done pretty much everything you could do to remove those pages from Google, and that Google has removed them.
There are two possibilities that I can think of. First, Google is finding new pages or new URLs at least. These may be old pages that have some sort of a parameter on them or something like that that are causing Google to find some new pages even though you're not adding any new pages.
Another possibility is that, I found that the site:search is not entirely accurate. So, it's more like anything else that Google gives us words this kind of estimate of the actual figure. It's possible that Google was giving you a smaller number of pages if in that original 3700 they said they had. And now they're just reporting more of the pages that they had had in their index, which they weren't showing before.
By the way, when I do a search for site:top four office.co.uk, I only get 2600 results.
-
I no longer see the pages. No chance Google has seen any additional pages as we spend every day looking at new pages indexed by using the filter and site:top4office.co.uk.
Any ideas?
-
Just a quick question, do you see the URLs you "removed" still in the index? Or is it possible that Google has found a different set of 3000 URLs on your site?
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Fix Google Index error
I changed my blog URL structure Can Someone please let me how to solve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Index or not index Categories
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc. Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct. Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this. Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Google Analytics: how to filter out pages with low bounce rate?
Hello here, I am trying to find out how I can filter out pages in Google Analytics according to their bounce rate. The way I am doing now is the following: 1. I am working inside the Content > Site Content > Landing Pages report 2. Once there, I click the "advanced" link on the right of the filter field. 3. Once there, I define to "include" "Bounce Rate" "Greater than" "0.50" which should show me which pages have a bounce rate higher of 0.50%.... instead I get the following warning on the graph: "Search constraints on metrics can not be applied to this graph" I am afraid I am using the wrong approach... any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
De Index Section of Page?
Hey all! We're having a couple of issues with a certain section of our page that we don't want to index. Basically, our cross sells change really quickly, and big G is ranking them and linking to them even when they've long gone. Is it possible to put some kind of no index tag for a specific section of the page? See below 🙂 http://www.freestylextreme.com/uk/Home/Brands/DC-Shoe-Co-/Mens-DC-Shoe-Co-Hoodies-and-Sweaters/DC-Black-Rob-Dyrdek-Official-Sweater.aspx Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elbeno0 -
Why are so many pages indexed?
We recently launched a new website and it doesn't consist of that many pages. When you do a "site:" search on Google, it shows 1,950 results. Obviously we don't want this to be happening. I have a feeling it's effecting our rankings. Is this just a straight up robots.txt problem? We addressed that a while ago and the number of results aren't going down. It's very possible that we still have it implemented incorrectly. What are we doing wrong and how do we start getting pages "un-indexed"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0