That's why I mentioned: "eventually". But thanks for the added information. Hopefully it's clear now for the original poster.

Yes they will be eventually. As you disallow Google to crawl the URLs it will probably start hiding the descriptions for some of these image pages soon as they can't crawl them anymore. Then at some point they'll stop looking at them at all.

Hi Mark,

Usually going with hreflang is the best option out there, Google will then recognise that the data that comes from such a domain is the same but translated or updated to reflect the changes for that language/country. But I must admit that usually I see that the content is translated. So keeping it in English might not be the best idea.

You are on WordPress I guess? This is a common thing that might show up there we have the same thing. What we did is set up in Google Search Console that they need to ignore the URL parameter.

Definitely not, AMP is more a markup then something that requires it needs HTTPS.

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.

I wonder what kind of bots or crawlers you were seeing before because we have millions of visitors in our analytics set-ups, no filters to filter them out and we barely see any traffic coming from browsers or hostnames that may be identified as such.

The idea from Andrew is nice, but my guess would be that you're targeting multiple events so that might run into issues. What you could do is add some more regular expression and make it like this:

Disallow: ^/news/events-calendar/usa$

I wouldn't say that Google would start ignoring the more often but more that it might be that they're going to use other pieces of the text that they think might be mor relevant or changes the capitalization themselves in the SERPs while using your own text.

Hi Gary,

Could be, but just submitting your articles usually isn't good enough as you haven't proved that the topic you're writing about can be interesting for the editors that work at these publishers. I do work in/with a media company and the content that we get pitched is 9/10 terrible and the pitches even worse most of the times. Build up a relationship, work with the editors and make sure that you can create great content together with them instead of just writing what you want and hoping that your content will get published. By following this approach you'll always start to build a win-win solution.

Martijn.