Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
-
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week.
I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front.
For example, I add to the removal tool:-
https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition
On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:-
http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition
I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look?
AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION
If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request?
www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_...
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
-
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.
I think I will add the https to WMT and remove them that way.
I will take a look through the .htaccess file and the creation of the ssl robots file. A while back, it seemed that Google was indexing a lot of my site as https and then the dropped it and went mainly back to http. I will get that sorted to make it clear.
-
Hi there
I'll start with question 2 first as it's a bit easier to answer. Robots.txt blocks the crawling of a page, but not necessarily indexing. Of course, if the page cannot be crawled it will be deindexed eventually anyway, but if you're getting that description for one of your URLs, Google has not been able to access it and will stop trying to. So that is usually enough, although if you want to remove it as well, you can by all means.
For question 1 - GWT is a bit awkward in the sense that it treats http and https versions of your site as different webmaster properties. Furthermore, if you want to remove a URL on your site, it will always prefix it with the http/https version of your site, no matter how you enter it.
If you added another WMT property that was https://www.yourdomain.com - you would be able to manage that domain as well and thus you would be able to remove any URLs under that prefix.
Incidentally, if you want to block all HTTPS pages from being accessed, you can do that with a special instruction in your htaccess file and robots txt. You can instruct the Googlebot and other bots to read a specific robots.txt file if they visit an HTTPS URL. To do that, you would first add this to your htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} ^on$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/robots.txt$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /robots_ssl.txt [L]This command basically says "if the URL has https, read the robots_ssl.txt file". You then upload a file called robots_ssl.txt to your root domain. In the txt file you just add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /So now, if a bot reaches an https URL, it has to read the robots_ssl.txt file and upon reading that, they are denied access. That would prevent all of your https URLs from being indexed.
That might be useful to you, but if you go ahead and use it please take care to backup all your files in case anything goes wrong - your htaccess file is very important!
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
-
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
A few pages deindexed from Google .. PLEASE HELP!
My client has a fairly new site and we were agressively building content to the website. It is an ecommerce store and we have got a blog as well. We guest blogged in a few places and wrote 3-5 articles a day. Last few days, i noticed 3-4 pages that we were building links to got deindexed. What could be the reason? We weren't using any bots to build links, only a couple of it around 5-10 links to a page. Google WMT is not showing any messages and no manual action is seen. What could be the reason? I've submitted those URL for reindex and so far nothing seems to work. Any idea? Please help.
Technical SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Why is Google not displaying the right URL on SERP?
Google is not displaying the URL correctly for this page. (See image) Here is the search that I performed: http://goo.gl/xk7L8 If you click on the URL, it doesn't take you to the page that it the URL references. Any ideas? It should show this URL: http://www.theskincentermd.com/breast-enhancement tsc-serp.png
Technical SEO | | theBREWROOM0 -
Google webmaster tools
I have linked webmaster tools to Google analytics account. My question is where can i see Webmaster reports in Google analytics ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Our Development team is planning to make our website nearly 100% AJAX and JavaScript. My concern is crawlability or lack thereof. Their contention is that Google can read the pages using the new #! URL string. What do you recommend?
Discussion around AJAX implementations and if anybody has achieved high rankings with a full AJAX website or even a partial AJAX website.
Technical SEO | | DavidChase0 -
Duplicate Content from Google URL Builder
Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?
Technical SEO | | joshuaopinion0 -
Should Canonical URLs be used in Wordpress?
Wordpress offers Canonical URLs in the "All in one SEO" settings. I know that canonical tags for page content will cause the search engine to ignore the content, but I don't understand this setting in Wordpress. The Canonical URLs box for my blog had been checked until a couple weeks ago. I unchecked it (removing the canonical tag) and now I have about 300 duplicate content pages acccording to my SEOMoz reports. It appears that it's just the blog tag in the url now that is causing the confusion. Here's an example of the same url with two tags: http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/aclu/ http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/rfid/ Should I activate the canonical URL setting in Wordpress again. If not, how can I fix this? Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Regards, Brad
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0