Sitemaps is definitely not the way to go for this as you can't just have an expires tag in there and it would make pages go away. The best option to go with is the meta robots and then put them either on nonindex, nofollow, or noindex, follow. With this approach and hopefully with a relative high crawl rate you can make sure that the data from these pages will be removed from the Google Index as soon as possible.

If you still want these pages to be indexed but maybe just not have them crawled anymore, which I don't think you'd like to do based on your explanation then go with robots.txt and excluding the pages in there that you'd like to.

Hey!

Usually tag pages are pretty useless and they could be removed if they don't provide any additional information. In your case I would make sure to see if there is any overlap between tags and categories and accordingly to that remove the tags. You could use the canonical tags, but that's mostly putting band aid on something that is fundamentally broken I'd say.

Martijn.

Hi James,

The right syntax is:

Sitemap: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml

When you retry it should show up as working.

Martijn.

Hi,

Have you also excluded these pages from the robots.txt file so you can make sure that they're also not being crawled?
The code for the redirect looks something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/mono* - [G,NC]

Martijn.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brutal-poll-shows-most-people-214647063.html Good luck!

Do they have any insights from Google Ads on their branded keyword campaigns? That would usually be my first guess, somebody started bidding on their brand keywords which would take at least 10% away likely from your regular organic clicks by just pushing it down the page.