NOINDEX content still showing in SERPS after 2 months
-
I have a website that was likely hit by Panda or some other algorithm change. The hit finally occurred in September of 2011. In December my developer set the following meta tag on all pages that do not have unique content:
name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />
It's been 2 months now and I feel I've been patient, but Google is still showing 10,000+ pages when I do a search for site:http://www.mydomain.com
I am looking for a quicker solution. Adding this many pages to the robots.txt does not seem like a sound option. The pages have been removed from the sitemap (for about a month now). I am trying to determine the best of the following options or find better options.
- 301 all the pages I want out of the index to a single URL based on the page type (location and product). The 301 worries me a bit because I'd have about 10,000 or so pages all 301ing to one or two URLs. However, I'd get some link juice to that page, right?
- Issue a HTTP 404 code on all the pages I want out of the index. The 404 code seems like the safest bet, but I am wondering if that will have a negative impact on my site with Google seeing 10,000+ 404 errors all of the sudden.
- Issue a HTTP 410 code on all pages I want out of the index. I've never used the 410 code and while most of those pages are never coming back, eventually I will bring a small percentage back online as I add fresh new content. This one scares me the most, but am interested if anyone has ever used a 410 code.
Please advise and thanks for reading.
-
Just wanted to let you know that submitting all the sites I wanted removed into an XML sitemap worked. I then submitted that sitemap to webmaster tools and listed it in the robots.txt. When doing query "site:domain.com" index pages went from 20k+ down to 700 in a matter of days.
-
I could link to them then, but what about creating a custom sitemap for just content that I want removed? Would that have the same effect?
-
If they are not linked to then spiders will not find the noindex code. They could suffer in the SERPs for months and months.
-
If all these pages are under a directory structure than you have the option to remove a complete directory in URL removal option. See if that is feasible in your case.
-
I suppose I'll wait longer. Crawl rate over the last 90 days is a high of 3,285 and average of 550 with a low of 3 according to webmaster tools.
-
Yeah the pages are low PR and are not linked to at all from the site. I've never heard of removing a page via webmaster tools. How do I do that? I also have to remove several thousand.
*edit: It looks like I have to remove them one at a time which is not feasible in my case. Is there a faster way?
-
If you want a page out of the index fast the best way is to do it through webmaster tools. It's easy and lasts for about six months. Then, if they find your page again it will register the noindex and you should be fine.
As EGOL said, if it's a page that isn't crawled very often then it could be a LONG time before it gets deindexed.
-
I removed some pages from the index and used the same line of code...
name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />
My pages dropped from the index within 2 or 3 days - but this is a site that has very heavy spider activity.
If your site is not crawled very much or these are low PR pages (such as PR1, PR2) it could take google a while to revisit and act upon your noindex instructions - but two months seems a bit long.
Is your site being crawled vigorously? Look in webmaster tools to see if crawling declined abruptly when your rankings fell. Check there also for crawl problems.
If I owned your site and the PR of these pages is low I would wait a while longer before doing anything. If my patience was wearing thin I would do the 301 redirect because that will transfer the linkjuice from those pages to the target URL of the redirect - however, you might wait quite a while to see the redirect take effect. That's why my first choice would be to wait longer.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Wrong target content in the SERP regarding language
Hi Guys! I'm currently under an SEO issue and need some advices about it. My problem is that, Google doesn't show the good pages in the SERPs regarding the languages. In fact, I translated some content in Italian, German, French etc ... When someone use the branding name of the project to find it by google, if this guy is French, German, or something else, Google shows the English version in the results. I of course would like google showing the German version for a German guy in the SERP ... I already made properly my hreflang tags. Some tips to fix it? Thanks a lot in advance! And hope everybody had a merry christmas!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBubble0 -
Are HTML Sitemaps Still Effective With "Noindex, Follow"?
A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages. To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index. Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Will duplicate content across a .net website and a .ch have negative affects on SERPs?
Hi, I am working with a company that has a .net site and a .ch website that are identical. Will this duplicate content have a negative affect on SERPs? Thanks Ali.B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bmeisterali0 -
How about a discussion on Penguin 2.0?
Penguin 2.0 was officially released today. I'm sure we've all seen Matt's video. http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544 Ideas for building sharable, linkable content? New strategies? What to avoid, what not to do, etc? Let's get a discussion going!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Http and https duplicate content?
Hello, This is a quick one or two. 🙂 If I have a page accessible on http and https count as duplicate content? What about external links pointing to my website to the http or https page. Regards, Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Ajax Content Indexed
I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wwmind1 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0