Robots.txt Disallowed Pages and Still Indexed
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Alright, I am pretty sure I know the answer is "Nothing more I can do here." but I just wanted to double check. It relates to the robots.txt file and that pesky "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt". Typically people want the URL indexed and the normal Meta Description to be displayed but I don't want the link there at all. I purposefully am trying to robots that stuff outta there.
My question is, has anybody tried to get a page taken out of the Index and had this happen; URL still there but pesky robots.txt message for meta description? Were you able to get the URL to no longer show up or did you just live with this?Thanks folks, you are always great!
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And don't forget to remove disallow in robots.txt first, if you want to remove it from index. Because if you add meta nofollow while the page is disallowed it won't go anywhere, crawler will not check it and it will stay indexed.
Allow > Add meta noindex > wait for it to be deindexed > Disallow
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Hi Chris,
This is a common misconception about the robots.txt file. It's not intended to remove URLs from the index, only to prevent crawling of URLs/folders/parameters/etc.
Here's a quote straight from the Search Console Help site: "You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results."
You can temporarily remove that URL using Search Console. To permanently remove it, you'll need to add a meta robots noindex tag, the only sure-fire way to prevent indexation. Here's what that tag looks like:
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