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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.
Phillip,
If you've deleted the URLs, there's not much else for you to do. You're experiencing the lag between when Google crawls and indexes pages new pages and when it finds and removes a 404 URL from it's index.
You should think 90 days as an approximate time frame for your page count in the index to start dropping. Here's more from google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419
Freshness of a page isn't necessary on all counts, as a page may maintain high rankings in spite of not having been updated for years. For many, if not most website owners, freshness is not going to keep them out of the rankings.
Moving forward though, with social and authorship playing a larger role in rankings, more of your competitors will be finding that effective use of those channels will help lift the authority of their domain, giving them a ranking advantage over you if you're not networking and publishing as well. I think for most website owners, having active social profiles attached to your domain will be worth paying more attention to than the freshness of their content.
That's why tagging came into vogue but too often, it's overdone.
Tags should be used as a way to help your readers find your content more easily. You likely don't need to give your readers 15 ways to zero in on the content they might be interested in--5 is probably more than enough. Personally, I'm not sure I've ever clicked on any tags on a website's blog.
The noindex meta tag keeps the page out of the index but since images have their own url, it doesn't keep them out of the index, so you should use the noimageindex directive on the pages where the images in question reside.
Steve, As long as no other resources are are linking to your images, you could use the noimageindex directive as such:
If you made the .nl site the same as the .com com site, you could also cross-domain rel=canonical each page over to the .com site, which would leave visitors on the .nl site but assign all value over to the .com. As Ash said though, putting unique content--either Dutch or English--might me your most effective option. It may be even more effective if you host it in the Netherlands, too.
Ramesh,
As EGOL said here, if you could "manufacture rankings" by tossing up a thousand domains then everybody everywhere would be doing it. It's just not a tactic that's worth undertaking today. Put your efforts into main domain and focus on RCS and that will take you much further.
The last conference I attended (Blueglass Tampa) had a facebook post where everyone who would be attending could introduce themselves if they chose to. It was a great way learn about those you might be sitting next to at the the lunch table or the bar. Unfortunately I won't be at Mozcon, but I'd certainly recommend creating a resource such as that well before the conference starts.