How to remove my site's pages in search results?

[esiow2013]

I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt?

I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing).

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /$

[CleverPhD]

Why not just 404/410 those pages?

[esiow2013]

Hi Matt! I've already tried your suggestion. I'll let you know what's the result. Thanks a lot man!

[datawork]

why don't you try adding a meta robots tag on those pages with "NOINDEX".

i would also do remove url with WMT

[esiow2013]

These are just test pages and I need them to be private and not visible in Google after I test. I understand that there will be a drop in SERP rankings.

[maxweb]

I would do

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?
Allow: /

But test it first in WMT first to be safe. However, you must be sure that this is the route you want to go down. Robots.txt will prevent all of those pages from being indexed, which means that none of their content will count. Any links to these pages may also be devalued. The result is a potential drop in SERPs.

What is the reason why you don't want them appearing? That way we may find an alternative solution.

[MattAntonino]

This is basically a duplicate of your other thread where I gave you that code.  Yes, it should block the other pages.  Put that in, fetch in WMT and you should be right.

Also, you can test it before you implement in WMT as well. I tried it on my end and it works.