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.
Hide sitelinks from Google search results
-
Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide.
I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!
-
Yes, I tried the old Search Console option before I posted in here but sadly, it just redirects you back to the new version. However, I didn't even think about the redirect opportunity and considering the website is built on Wordpress, that should be easy enough to set up.
Thanks so much!
-
Ah. So, then I might try one of the following:
- My preferred approach would be to set up a redirect for that URL to a valid new URL. That way, you would make the best use of the traffic coming from the Sitelink, for whatever time it might remain there. After a while, I suspect Google will either update the sitelink title and description with those from the new redirected page, or perhaps drop that sitelink eventually in favor of another page.
- If you can't do the above (maybe you are not able to set up redirects from the old URL), then I might go the route of using the Search console (old version) to request removal of the old URL (Google Index > Remove URLs). If it really does give a proper 404 response code, then this should work. It doesn't do the job on its own if the URL still gives a valid response code. But a 404 plus a removal should get rid of it. That said, then you are rolling the dice with whatever Google decides to promote as a replacement sitelink. So, I would prefer the first approach, if I thought I could make the best of the traffic coming from that link.
-
Hi There,
Thanks so much for your reply. The trick with this is that the page that is showing as a sitelink is not even part any of the website's sitemaps. We just rebuilt the website for the client about 3 months ago - went from static website to Wordpress and for some unknown reason - Google is remembering a .php link from the old website somehow, but it is nowhere in our FTP, so if you click on it - it provides a 404 error.
The other disadvantage is that the old website was never SEO'ed or had proper page titles so users are confusing that sitelink as the new website link and it goes to a 404 page and people think the website isn't working.
Have I explained a bit better? Does that change your suggestion? Thanks!
-
For an html page, you would include the following line in the HEAD section of the page:
But in your question, I am unclear if you are maybe trying to noindex the sitemap itself? If that is the case, if you are wanting to direct Google to not index an XML file (rather than an html page), in theory you could inject a X-Robots-Tag: noindex into the header for the sitemap file (google how to do that). But probably no need to do that.
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
-
Another company is coming up in search results when I type in my phone number
If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541, another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up. We do not come up at all for this search. However, if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not. Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
I added a WP Customer Reviews plugin but nothing seems to appear on Google search
Hi, I've added the wordpress Wp Customer Reviews plugin to a my client's website and we brought some past clients to put on reviews in order to empower the hReview factor. Google as scraped the website several times since but we don't see any change in the organic serp. Can you please tell me if I've done something wrong or I forgot something? That's the website - Capital Garage Door Thanks!
Technical SEO | | captainjoe0 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0