Remove internal site SERPS from Google Index?
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1. Internal Serp pages did not have a robots meta tag
2. As a result, client site has thousands (~4,400) of internal site SERP pages in the Google index.
3. We added the NoIndex, Follow attribute to all internal SERPS
4. We Disallowed: domain.com/internal-search-operator in Robots.txt
5. No new SERP pages are being indexed, but the other 4000 something that were already there are still in the index weeks later.
6. The pages are dynamically created and still work, so I can't use the Remove Content tool from google, because the pages don't 404.
Is there any way to get these pages out of the index besides just waiting and hoping google eventuall drops them?
Thanks
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You can still submit a url removal request from GWT, because it checks for 1 of 3 things:
- 404 header response code
- NOINDEX meta tag
- Robots.txt disallow rule
So even if its not 404 Google will still do the removal.
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You can create a formal request to Google using Webmaster Tools and tell them the URLs or list of URLs that you'd like removed from the index. Whether or not they actually remove them is a completely different story.
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I should have explained it what I meant by SERPS better.
These pages are generated by doing a text search on the site. (Magento) So yes, they are product listings, but obviously most queries are different, so the dynamically created pages are all unique but useless.
Thanks for the idea about rel=canonical them back to the search page - I will look into that.
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Note: By SERPs I'm assuming you're referring to Search Results within the site (e.g. a product listing) and not actual Google SERPs.
If so, it sounds like it could be a case for canonical. If the pages are all site.com/search.htm?searchterm=xxxx&page=y&rows=100 kind of thing you could canonical them all back down to search.htm.
If you're not familiar with canonical here's a YouMoz post that explains it pretty well:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
Based on my experience in the past the canonicalized pages will eventually 'disappear' from the index (not really, but Google doesn't display them anymore) in time. They would also eventually fall out already with what you've done in regards to noindex no follow etc., but I've found it takes longer.
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