Google's Omitted Results - Attempt to De-Index
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We're trying to get webpages from our QA site out of Google's index. We've inserted the NOINDEX tags. Google now shows only 3 results (down from 196,000), however, they offer a link to "show omitted results" at the bottom of the page. (A) Did we do something wrong? or (B) were we successful with our NOINDEX but Google will offer to show omitted results anyway?
Please advise! Thanks!
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worked like a charm! Thanks!
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Are you talking about a dev site? If so, the easiest solution is to add it in Webmaster Tools, verify ownership, then use the URL removal tool to take the whole site out of the index. Just enter / in the removal field.
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I'm assuming your noindex tags looks something like
name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> or name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>
and you have them on every single page that you don't want google to index?
How long ago did you do this because this a process that could take awhile, especially with 196,000 pages?
If it's been awhile and it's still doing this, you can also restrict these pages in your robots.txt so that Google doesn't crawl the pages at all.
Here's a blog related to this from google's webmaster central: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html
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