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.
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
-
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google.
It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index.
I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
-
Hooray! Usually, I just give my advice and then run away, so it's always nice to hear I was actually right about something
Seriously, glad you got it sorted out. -
Just a follow up to your suggestion.
I created sitemaps for the pages I want removed using the google spreadsheet importXML functions, which saved a lot of time.
It took a couple weeks but all of the pages, and similar pages, have successfully been removed from the index. Even the similar pages I didn't get a chance to put in the sitemap yet (importXML limits the results to 100).
Your suggestion worked!
-
I can't 404 dynamic search pages.
-
There are a mix of search pages and old mobile pages.
The search pages I've been testing out having the canonical point to the default search page. I've seen a slight drop in these pages - but I guess I just have to be more patient.
For the other pages the path is no longer there like you were mentioning. I like the idea of setting up the XML sitemap, I never even thought of making a bad/indexed page sitemap. I will give that a shot! Thankfully this will be a quick job with the importXml function in google spreadsheets! Great tip, hopefully it'll work.
-
Is there a crawl path to them currently? One issue I see a lot is that a bunch of pages get indexed, the path is found and cut off, NOINDEX (canonical, 301, etc.) is added, but then the pages never get re-crawled. Since they don't get recrawled, the page-level directive never gets honored.
If there's a URL parameter involved, you could use parameter-handling in GWT - it's not a perfect solution, but it sometimes seems to work without a re-crawl.
The other option would be to create a new XML sitemap with all of the bad/indexed URLs. This may push Google to re-crawl them and then see the tags to deindex. It's a bit safer than re-opening the crawl paths.
If they are being crawled and Google is just ignoring the NOINDEX for some reason, I'd try to 301 or canonical those pages to a primary search page, if that's feasible (probably canonical, since you don't want the users to 301). Sometimes, if a signal isn't working for that long, you just have to shake Google and try a different signal. Even following their exact recommendations, it rarely works as planned at large scale.
-
Don't use GWMT's removal tool to remove URLs which should not be in the index (unless those expose sensitive information). Best practise is to exclude them in robots.txt and to also ensure that the pages either 404 or have a noindex,noarchive tag.
-
Change the site structure and let the pages 404, Google will deindex them if they are not being linked to.
-
You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file. Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.
I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."
For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:
Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.phpThat should work. If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.
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
-
Google indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120