Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
-
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week.
I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front.
For example, I add to the removal tool:-
https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition
On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:-
http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition
I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look?
AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION
If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request?
www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_...
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
-
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.
I think I will add the https to WMT and remove them that way.
I will take a look through the .htaccess file and the creation of the ssl robots file. A while back, it seemed that Google was indexing a lot of my site as https and then the dropped it and went mainly back to http. I will get that sorted to make it clear.
-
Hi there
I'll start with question 2 first as it's a bit easier to answer. Robots.txt blocks the crawling of a page, but not necessarily indexing. Of course, if the page cannot be crawled it will be deindexed eventually anyway, but if you're getting that description for one of your URLs, Google has not been able to access it and will stop trying to. So that is usually enough, although if you want to remove it as well, you can by all means.
For question 1 - GWT is a bit awkward in the sense that it treats http and https versions of your site as different webmaster properties. Furthermore, if you want to remove a URL on your site, it will always prefix it with the http/https version of your site, no matter how you enter it.
If you added another WMT property that was https://www.yourdomain.com - you would be able to manage that domain as well and thus you would be able to remove any URLs under that prefix.
Incidentally, if you want to block all HTTPS pages from being accessed, you can do that with a special instruction in your htaccess file and robots txt. You can instruct the Googlebot and other bots to read a specific robots.txt file if they visit an HTTPS URL. To do that, you would first add this to your htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} ^on$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/robots.txt$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /robots_ssl.txt [L]This command basically says "if the URL has https, read the robots_ssl.txt file". You then upload a file called robots_ssl.txt to your root domain. In the txt file you just add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /So now, if a bot reaches an https URL, it has to read the robots_ssl.txt file and upon reading that, they are denied access. That would prevent all of your https URLs from being indexed.
That might be useful to you, but if you go ahead and use it please take care to backup all your files in case anything goes wrong - your htaccess file is very important!
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
-
Google keeps marking different pages as duplicates
My website has many pages like this: mywebsite/company1/valuation mywebsite/company2/valuation mywebsite/company3/valuation mywebsite/company4/valuation ... These pages describe the valuation of each company. These pages were never identical but initially, I included a few generic paragraphs like what is valuation, what is a valuation model, etc... in all the pages so some parts of these pages' content were identical. Google marked many of these pages as duplicated (in Google Search Console) so I modified the content of these pages: I removed those generic paragraphs and added other information that is unique to each company. As a result, these pages are extremely different from each other now and have little similarities. Although it has been more than 1 month since I made the modification, Google still marks the majority of these pages as duplicates, even though Google has already crawled their new modified version. I wonder whether there is anything else I can do in this situation? Thanks
Technical SEO | | TuanDo96270 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Removed Product page on our website, what to do
We just removed an entire product category on our website, (product pages still exist, but will be removed soon as well) Should we be setting up re-directs, or can we simply delete this category and product
Technical SEO | | DutchG
pages and do nothing? We just received this in Google Webmasters tools: Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. We have not updated the sitemap yet...Would this be enough to do or should we do more? You can view our website here: http://tinyurl.com/6la8 We removed the entire "Spring Planted Category"0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0