Should you use google url remover if older indexed pages are still being kept?
-
Hello,
A client recently did a redesign a few months ago, resulting in 700 pages being reduced to 60, mostly due to panda penalty and just low interest in products on those pages. Now google is still indexing a good number of them ( around 650 ) when we only have 70 on our sitemap.
Thing is google indexes our site on average now for 115 urls when we only have 60 urls that need indexing and only 70 on our sitemap. I would of thought these urls would be crawled and not found, but is taking a very long period of time.
Our rankings haven't recovered as much as we'd hope, and we believe that the indexed older pages are causes this.
Would you agree and also would you think removing those old urls via the remover tool would be best option? It would mean using the url remover tool for 650 pages.
Thank you in advance
-
Thanks!
Was hoping to recover a month ago but if google is still having these old urls cached, then they very well think we have them still, so hopefully once the urls are gone in google's brain we should see some improvement.
Thanks for clearing that up, hope this helps others in the same boat or somewhat close.
-
Just to clarify: Did check that there are no duplicate URL problems? Such as www and non-www.
In case that you've checked and everything is correct. Then, you're on the right path, I hope: Only 5pages with results, that makes 60 URL in SERPs.
Those that are only cached, will be gone.Hope it helps.
GR. -
Hello and Thanks!
How long ago did the redesign take place?
March 2016
All those pages that you want to be unindexed show any content?
No, in fact, when I search google site:domain.com I get 800 urls, but only page 1 - 5 have results, despite results showing 10 pages, so it's still cached but not the content, I believe?
These have been 404'd which is why I'm kinda at a loss as to whats going on.
-
Hi there!
How long ago did the redesign take place?
All those pages that you want to be unindexed show any content?In my experience, it took about 4 weeks to desapear from the index. But to get the pages taken down, those should be a 404.
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 Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page is it issue with base url?
Hi All, Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page. Is it issue or base url or relative url? Can you pls guide me? Looking to both tiny url you will get my point what i am saying. Please help Thanks!
Technical SEO | | amu1230 -
Not All Submitted URLs in Sitemap Get Indexed
Hey Guys, I just recognized, that of about 20% of my submitted URL's within the sitemap don't get indexed, at least when I check in the webmaster tools. There is of about 20% difference between the submitted and indexed URLs. However, as far as I can see I don't get within webmaster tools the information, which specific URLs are not indexed from the sitemap, right? Therefore I checked every single page in the sitemap manually by putting site:"URL" into google and every single page of the sitemap shows up. So in reality every page should be indexed, but why does webmaster tools shows something different? Thanks for your help on this 😉 Cheers
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
AJAX and High Number Of URLS Indexed
I recently took over as the SEO for a large ecommerce site. Every Month or so our webmaster tools account is hit with a warning for a high number of URLS. In each message they send there is a sample of problematic URLS. 98% of each sample is not an actual URL on our site but is an AJAX request url that users are making. This is a server side request so the URL does not change when users make narrowing selections for items like size, color etc. Here is an example of what one of those looks like Tire?0-1.IBehaviorListener.0-border-border_body-VehicleFilter-VehicleSelectPanel-VehicleAttrsForm-Makes We have over 3 million indexed URLs according to Google because of this. We are not submitting these urls in our site maps, Google Bot is making lots of AJAX selections according to our server data. I have used the URL Handling Parameter Tool to target some of those parameters that are currently set to let Google decide and set it to "no urls" with those parameters to be indexed. I still need more time to see how effective that will be but it does seem to have slowed the number of URLs being indexed. Other notes: 1. Overall traffic to the site has been steady and even increasing. 2. Google bot crawls an average of 241000 urls each day according to our crawl stats. We are a large Ecommerce site that sells parts, accessories and apparel in the power sports industry. 3. We are using the Wicket frame work for our website. Thanks for your time.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
Lots of Pages Dropped Out of Google's Index?
Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc. Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed. Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this? What should I interpret about this?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Home page URL
Hi, I work on this site: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/about-us. This is the home page URL. Should this be 301'd to: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? I have created a site map, which I submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, which includes these URL's: /about-us, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. There are a total of 3 pages on the website. Webmaster tools has only indexed 2 out of 3 pages. I think this is something to do with the /about-us URL, as when I do a site: search, these pages appear: www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. I am not sure why Google has indexed the home page as www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/ and not /about-us? Is it a bad idea in general not to have your homepage as your root domain? I added a to the homepage, but am wondering if this was the right thing to do? Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0
