Removing Personal content from Google Index
-
Hi everyone,
A user is complaining that her name is appearing in google search through our job ads site, so I removed such ads through Search Console, but the problem is not the ads anymore but our internal search results.
The ads are no longer live but our searches has been indexed by google back then, We have been manually taking over 500 pages that included such name but more and more keep coming through pagination, we haven't found a pattern yet so pretty much any search result might have contained such name.
We might get some legal issues here, did you guys got into anything similar before?
We have just set some rules so that this doesn't happen again, but still can't find a way to deal with this one.
Thanks in advance.
PD: Not sure if this is the right category to fit it.
-
Hello JoaoCJ,
My recommendation is to not allow internal search result pages to be indexed. You should block them from being accessed via the Robots.txt file and then request their removal from GSC. This is what Google recommends.
There are always exceptions to the rule. However, best practices is all I can provide without knowing more about the situation, such as whether those internal search pages are an important part of your taxonomy (rare) or are also receiving significant, high quality organic search traffic (also rare).
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
-
Indexing pages content that is not needed
Hi All, I have a site that has articles and a side block that shows interesting articles in a column block. While we google for a keyword i can see the page but the meta description is picked from the side block "interesting articles" and not the actual article in the page. How can i deny indexing that block alone Thanks
Technical SEO | | jomin740 -
WMT "Index Status" vs Google search site:mydomain.com
Hi - I'm working for a client with a manual penalty. In their WMT account they have 2 pages indexed.If I search for "site:myclientsdomain.com" I get 175 results which is about right. I'm not sure what to make of the 2 indexed pages - any thoughts would be very appreciated. google-1.png google-2.png
Technical SEO | | JohnBolyard0 -
Should I be concerned about Google indexing an old domain if the listings redirect to the new domain?
I noticed this about Moz's old domain SEOMoz.org. If the URLs from the old domain are redirecting, is there any reason to be concerned about an old domain still appearing to be indexed by Google? See here: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Aseomoz.org Links to seomoz.org are listed, but if you click them they redirect to moz.com. Is this anything to be concerned about or is everything operating as expected?
Technical SEO | | 352inc0 -
How can I stop google indexing an image
I have put a map of cornwall on my site on the Corwnall Page, and for some reason Google.de has picked it up and shows it up in the top 4 images for a search for cornwall? The result is I am getting about 80% of the traffic coming to my site for the search Cornwall (I get about 50 unique visits per day, over 40 a day are landing on the Cornwall page. Is this a problem for my normal SEO as a Close up Magician? Will google start to think my site is about Cornwall? Should I noindex the image (I say that like I know how! - How do I noindex that image? ) Or is any traffic to a site good traffic, I imagine they will be clicking on the link landing on the page and then leaving, which I suspect is not good for google reputation. Any thoughts anyone Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk Where they land http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/map-of-cornwall.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/magician-cornwall-magicians-hire-cornwall&h=904&w=1000&sz=167&tbnid=9GFlDv3BTz4ikM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=110&zoom=1&usg=__-b4bUYWREU_wAy2M04LrsrkzZpw=&docid=AUFmzso0arbGDM&sa=X&ei=HLZ2UpGYDMrY0QWXp4D4Dg&ved=0CEgQ9QEwAw&dur=2958
Technical SEO | | rnperki0 -
Why has Google stopped indexing my content?
Mystery of the day! Back on December 28th, there was a 404 on the sitemap for my website. This lasted 2 days before I noticed and fixed. Since then, Google has not indexed my content. However, the majority of content prior to that date still shows up in the index. The website is http://www.indieshuffle.com/. Clues: Google reports no current issues in Webmaster tools Two reconsideration requests have returned "no manual action taken" When new posts are detected as "submitted" in the sitemap, they take 2-3 days to "index" Once "indexed," they cannot be found in search results unless I include url:indieshuffle.com The sitelinks that used to pop up under a basic search for "Indie Shuffle" are now gone I am using Yoast's SEO tool for Wordpress (and have been for years) Before December 28th, I was doing 90k impressions / 4.5k clicks After December 28th, I'm now doing 8k impressions / 1.3k clicks Ultimately, I'm at a loss for a possible explanation. Running an SEOMoz audit comes up with warnings about rel=canonical and a few broken links (which I've fixed in reaction to the report). I know these things often correct themselves, but two months have passed now, and it continues to get progressively worse. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | indieshuffle0 -
A site is not being indexed by Google Yahoo or Bing
This site - http://adoptionconnection.org/ is not being indexed by any of the search engines. I checked the easy stuff - robots text is: <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">all, index, follow</a>" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp</a>" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noydir</a>" /> I have checked what I can determine would cause the issue but have found nothing to prevent it from being indexed. I'm thinking it may be re-directs etc. Any answer would be great. Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | Intergen0 -
How do I get content to be indexed at the top?
I have a paragraph at the top of my homepage. I was told I could use css to make the content visually appear at the bottom of the page but it would still get indexed at the top of the page, still giving it the same level of importance. Can anyone tell me how to do this?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0 -
Getting Google to index new pages
I have a site, called SiteB that has 200 pages of new, unique content. I made a table of contents (TOC) page on SiteB that points to about 50 pages of SiteB content. I would like to get SiteB's TOC page crawled and indexed by Google, as well as all the pages it points to. I submitted the TOC to Pingler 24 hours ago and from the logs I see the Googlebot visited the TOC page but it did not crawl any of the 50 pages that are linked to from the TOC. I do not have a robots.txt file on SiteB. There are no robot meta tags (nofollow, noindex). There are no 'rel=nofollow' attributes on the links. Why would Google crawl the TOC (when I Pinglered it) but not crawl any of the links on that page? One other fact, and I don't know if this matters, but SiteB lives on a subdomain and the URLs contain numbers, like this: http://subdomain.domain.com/category/34404 Yes, I know that the number part is suboptimal from an SEO point of view. I'm working on that, too. But first wanted to figure out why Google isn't crawling the TOC. The site is new and so hasn't been penalized by Google. Thanks for any ideas...
Technical SEO | | scanlin0