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Thanks Peter - I didn't know you could do that. I'll pass it on to the developers (who might already know, but wouldn't hurt to reinforce its importance).

Thanks Russ. I think the differences to the content between the two will only be minor/superficial, so I guess the approach makes sense and shouldn't affect the SEO side of things too much.

Hi,

A client of mine has compliance issues in their industry and has to show two different types of content to visitors:

• domain.com/customer-a/about-us
• domain.com/customer-b/about-us

Next year, they have to increase that to three different types of customer. Rather than creating a third section (customer-c), because it's very similar to one of the types of customers already (customer-b), their web development agency is suggesting changing the content based on cookies, so if a user has indentified themselves as customer-b, they'll be shown /customer-b/, but if they've identified themselves as customer-c, they'll see a different version of /customer-b/ - in other words, the URL won't change, but the content on the page will change, based on their cookie selection.

I'm uneasy about this from an SEO POV because:

1. Google will only be able to see one version (/customer-b/ presumably), so it might miss out on indexing valuable /customer-c/ content,
2. It makes sense to separate them into three URL paths so that Google can index them all,
3. It feels like a form of cloaking - i.e. Google only sees one version, when two versions are actually available.

I've done some research but everything I'm seeing is saying that it's fine, that it's not a form of cloaking. I can't find any examples specific to this situation though. Any input/advice would be appreciated.

Note: The content isn't shown differently based on geography - i.e. these three customers would be within one country (e.g. the UK), which means that hreflang/geo-targeting won't be a workaround unfortunately.

Thanks Chris! So, in my instance, should I just add that directive to the 2 pages that feature the images but are still indexed? Or should I also include it to those pages that are noindexed, just to be on the safe side?

Thanks Ash. I've just found this Google resource about it - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/59819?hl=en - that says "URL removal requests expire after 90 days, after which the content may appear in our search results again." Is that true? Is there a more permanent way or would I/the client have to manually re-remove it every 90 days?

Hi all,

A client wanted a few pages noindexed, which was no problem using the meta robots noindex tag.

However they now want associated images removed, some of which still appear on pages that they still want indexed. I added the images to their robots.txt file a few weeks ago (probably over a month ago actually) but they're all still showing when you do an image search.

What's the best way to noindex them for good, and how do I go about implementing it?

Many thanks,

Steve