Site: inurl: Search

[GrappleAgency]

I have a site that allows for multiple filter options and some of these URL's have these have been indexed. I am in the process of adding the noindex, nofollow meta tag to these pages but I want to have an idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed so I can monitor when these have been re crawled and dropped. The structure for these URL's is:

http://www.example.co.uk/category/women/shopby/brand1--brand2.html

The unique identifier for the multiple filtered URL's is --, however I've tried using site:example.co.uk inurl:-- but this doesn't seem to work. I have also tried using regex but still no success. I was wondering if there is a way around this so I can get a rough idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed?

Thanks

[SamuelScott]

Thumbed up for being a great response! Wish I had thought of that.

[Ray-pp]

If you can't find an advanced search operator to find what you need through Google Search, here is an alternate method to achieve the list of URLs you're looking for:

1. Access the site's Google Analytics account

2. Go to Reporting > Acquisition > Channels

3. Select the 'Organic Search' channel

4. Set the 'Primary Dimension' to 'Landing Page'

5. Export all of the Landing Pages that received visits through Organic Search

These are all the pages, that GA was tracking, that received a visitor from a search engine. They may not be all that are indexed, but these are the ones that may be most important since they actually attracted a visit from an organic search.

6. In Excel you can use a variety of methods to find the landing pages with double hyphens, it should be as simple as a Ctrl+F .. now plop the URLs you need to track into a clean sheet and use your favorite tool to see when they drop from the search engines.

[GrappleAgency]

Hi Samuel,

Thank you for your response.

Unfortunately we're unable to amend this part of the URL's as this is currently generated trough a module we're using. The process we were looking to use is to add noindex, nofollow to the multiple filtered URL's and once these had been dropped append the URL's with something along the lines of ?multifilter so we could then add this to the robots.txt.

Do you think it might be worth appending the URL's with ?multifilter first and then using the site: inurl: process?

Thanks

[SamuelScott]

A double hyphen may too subtle of an element in a URL for Google to "pick up." I would try changing the unique identifier to a special word or a short series of numbers. Then, I would think that your site: inurl: process would work.