Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags

    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 a site from Google index with no index met tags

    Technical SEO
    5
    5
    1718
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Chris_Wright
      Chris_Wright last edited by

      Hi there!

      I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it?

      Thank you for your help in advance!

      L

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • effectdigital
        effectdigital @JordanLowry last edited by

        This is the best response. Others have cited using robots.txt, that's a bad idea IMO. Robots.txt will stop Google from crawling pages, Meta no-index directs Google not to index a page. If Google can't crawl a page (due to robots.txt) then they won't be able to 'find' the no-index directive. As Jordan says, no-index should come first. When all pages are de-indexed, then OP can begin to think about robots.txt as suggested by Rajesh. OP could also combine Meta no-index with status code 410 (gone) to make it a stronger signal - though this is inadvisable with OP's situation (where the site will remain live for users, but be gone from Google). In the end, Jordan's reply is the best one which has been left here

        A final note might be that, instead of editing the HTML of all OPs pages, OP could fire no-index though x-robots via the HTTP header (which is often more scaleable)

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Rajesh.Prajapati
          Rajesh.Prajapati last edited by

          You need to use robots.txt for the same. Just write a rule and remove your site from Google.

          Rule is -

          # rules
          
          

          User-agent: *

          Disallow: /
          
          

          After this, Remove this meta tag -
          name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW"/> OR you can update this meta tag with this -
          name="robots" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • ThomeedisonSam
            ThomeedisonSam last edited by

            Depending on your interest and are you really willing to remove? Setting issues are there. I am also looking for AmazeInvent

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
            • JordanLowry
              JordanLowry last edited by

              Depending on what CMS you're using you should be able to add a meta no-index tag sitewide fairly easily. I know with WordPress there's an option in the backend under "Setting", "Reading" Discourage search engines from indexing this site that should allow you to apply a meta no index tag site wide.

              If you're not on WordPress you should be able to edit your code and apply a no index sitewide. You might need a tool like FileZilla so you can set up some sort of FTP access and edit your Header file directly.

              Cheers 🙂

              effectdigital 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Christian_T

                Homepage was removed from google and got deranked

                Hello experts I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back. It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist. 4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk". Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk". At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better.  Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page. After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image. Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all? For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results

                Technical SEO | | Christian_T
                0
              • Kilgray

                How long does Google takes to re-index title tags?

                Hi, We have carried out changes in our website title tags. However, when I search for these pages on Google, I still see the old title tags in the search results. Is there any way to speed this process up? Thanks

                Technical SEO | | Kilgray
                0
              • kirmeliux

                Will Google Recrawl an Indexed URL Which is No Longer Internally Linked?

                We accidentally introduced Google to our incomplete site. The end result: thousands of pages indexed which return nothing but a "Sorry, no results" page. I know there are many ways to go about this, but the sheer number of pages makes it frustrating. Ideally, in the interim, I'd love to 404 the offending pages and allow Google to recrawl them, realize they're dead, and begin removing them from the index. Unfortunately, we've removed the initial internal links that lead to this premature indexation from our site. So my question is, will Google revisit these pages based on their own records (as in, this page is indexed, let's go check it out again!), or will they only revisit them by following along a current site structure? We are signed up with WMT if that helps.

                Technical SEO | | kirmeliux
                0
              • iragless

                How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.

                Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google).  Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total).  These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings?  Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them.  Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google?  Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian

                Technical SEO | | iragless
                0
              • MikeSEOTruven

                Hreflang Tag great for Google, what about Bing or others?

                I've read that the Hreflang Tag is all the rave for International solutions on a per page basis. I haven't read much about what International agencies are using for non-Google search engines such as Bing. Is the common language meta tags the only solution? would love to see an article that addresses this

                Technical SEO | | MikeSEOTruven
                0
              • JohnHuynh

                How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?

                When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,

                Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh
                0
              • GregDixson

                Google Showing Multiple Listings For Same Site?

                I've been optimizing a small static HTML site and have been working to increase the keyword rankings, yet have always ranked #1 for the company name. But, I've now noticed the company name is taking more than just the first position - the site is now appearing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position (each position referencing a different page of the site). Great.. who doesn't want to dominate a page of Google! ..But it looks kind of untidy and not usually how links from the same site are displayed. Is this normal? I'm used to seeing results from the same site grouped under the primary result, but not like this. any info appreciated 🙂

                Technical SEO | | GregDixson
                0
              • SharewarePros

                Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search

                Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio

                Technical SEO | | SharewarePros
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.