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.
Best practice for deindexing large quantities of pages
-
We are trying to deindex a large quantity of pages on our site and want to know what the best practice for doing that is. For reference, the reason we are looking for methods that could help us speed it up is we have about 500,000 URLs that we want deindexed because of mis-formatted HTML code and google indexed them much faster than it is taking to unindex them unfortunately.
We don't want to risk clogging up our limited crawl log/budget by submitting a sitemap of URLs that have "noindex" on them as a hack for deindexing. Although theoretically that should work, we are looking for white hat methods that are faster than "being patient and waiting it out", since that would likely take months if not years with Google's current crawl rate of our site.
-
Unfortunately, I don't think there's any easy/fast way to do this. I just ran a test to see how long it take Google to actually obey a noindex tag, and it's taken a little over 2 months for them all to be removed. I had 2 WP blogs that I added the noindex tag to all category, tag, and author pages and monitored the index count 4 or 5 times per week by running site:example.com inurl:/category/ queries. There was a lot of fluctuation at the beginnning, but eventually took hold after about 2 months. On one of the sites, I did add an XML sitemap with only the noindexed URLs on it, submitted it via Search Console, but that didn't seem to have an impact on how quickly they were dropped out.
See the screenshot below of my plotting of indexed pages per subfolder:
-
Hey,
you might be interested in this thread for getting your question answered.
https://moz.com/community/q/quickest-way-to-deindex-a-large-number-of-pages
Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin
-
Hi,
I have never tested the method that I'm sharing here. Please check once it might be helpful in your case.
https://www.searchcommander.com/how-to-bulk-remove-urls-google/
Thanks
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
-
SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow
I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz0 -
What are best page titles for sub-folders or sub-directories? Same as website?
Hi all, We always mention "brand & keyword" in every page title along with topic in the website, like "Topic | vertigo tiles". Let's say there is a sub-directory with hundreds of pages...what will be the best page title practice in mentioning "brand & keyword" across all pages of sub-directory to benefit in-terms if SEO? Can we add "vertigo tiles" to all pages of sub-directory? Or we must not give same phrase? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins2000 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0