Most Painless way of getting Duff Pages out of SE's Index
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Hi,
I've had a few issues that have been caused by our developers on our website. Basically we have a pretty complex method of automatically generating URL's and web pages on our website, and they have stuffed up the URL's at some point and managed to get 10's of thousands of duff URL's and pages indexed by the search engines.
I've now got to get these pages out of the SE's indexes as painlessly as possible as I think they are causing a Panda penalty.
All these URL's have an addition directory level in them called "home" which should not be there, so I have:
www.mysite.com/home/page123 instead of the correct URL www.mysite.com/page123
All these are totally duff URL's with no links going to them, so I'm gaining nothing by 301 redirects, so I was wondering if there was a more painless less risky way of getting them all out the indexes (IE after the stuff up by our developers in the first place I'm wary of letting them loose on 301 redirects incase they cause another issue!)
Thanks
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If all /home directories should be removed, and they all correlate directly to the same URL without the /home then the best means to correct the issue would be a single regex expression to redirect the URLs.
Once you add the redirect Google's index should be cleaned up in about 30 days.
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Add robots.txt to stop Google crawling the subdirectories you don't want shown such as /home
More information is available on http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt
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