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If the urls follow any particular pattern then you can use a  htaccess redirect and return the header code 410 / 403 / 404 to Google. (I suggest 410) They will soon drop out of the index. I don't know the exact .htaccess syntax off the top of my head but it will be something like this: If they all come from the same folder then it would look something like this: RedirectMatch 410 ^/folder/.*$ If they have a common character string after the forward slash (such as xyz) then it would look something like this: RedirectMatch 410 ^/xyz.*$ If they have any common character string footprints at all (such as xyz) then it would look something like this (now I'm guessing): RedirectMatch 410 ^/()xyz.$ This would be a pretty easy fix if all of those spammy urls have any common characters after the forward slash or they all originate from a certain folder.

Thanks everyone. Since 301 redirects are out of the question, what I've done is found all the directories that really shouldn't be on this site at all and noindexed them. None of those pages are good for rank for anything so it doesn't matter. The client is instructing their 'customers' to get their sites off the doubleknot site and onto their own domains. Once those are moved over there will still be lots of links pointing to doubleknot and fixing them will be a nightmare because there are just too many, but I'm going to see if they can do a sitewide edit and add rel="nofollow" to each link pointing to doubleknot's irrelevent directories and also see if we can do a mass search and replace to point the links to the right domain when necessary. If there is not a pattern, that will no be possible and someone will have to do it by hand. With noindex and nofollow working for us, that might be enough My client is a team of IT and computer science experts, and they've been advised of the problem. They're looking into ways to put their degrees to work to clean the data. @Richard, to answer your question, their rank is terrible. That's why they called me. Their website is also not at all optimized so I'm restructuring the architecture and asking them to provide new copy. Then I'll do the standard on-site optimization. It could be that might be enough to turn things around. And then it's linkbuilding time. Time will tell. Thanks again!

So, it's just refreshing itself, right? It should be ok - Google can view meta-refresh as 301-like if it's going to a new/different URL, but a refresh will probably be ignored. If the pages are the same content but different URLs, be careful - I'd at least make sure I had rel=canonical in place.

Why don't you sell those products? Is it because those other products are inferior in quality, too expensive for value, etc.? If there are specific reasons like that, it can some times be helpful to state that specifically as a means of helping to educate your customers and potentially sway them into seeing the value of what you do sell. The other thing to look at is what keywords are driving traffic to the page. Granted, this data is hard to get but you can get a good sense of this in Search Console. Figure out why you are ranking for the things you don't sell. For example, if you have a lot of links pointing to you referring people your way referencing something you don't carry, see if there is a way to change those links to something more specific Alternatively, if you are getting enough people coming to the site interested in products you don't carry but there isn't a great reason your company doesn't carry them, maybe see if there is a way you can carry the products (or resell them or something like that). I've worked with more than one client who didn't realize so many people may be interested in Product X until they saw the search traffic and that traffic helped them decide to change products offered.

Do not try to slow down the crawl rate, that would be bad for your site and not a good strategy. Investigate what pages are not jumping around. pages i have experienced to jump around are algoritmic penalty kind of jumping. (over optimized or duplicated content or low authority)

i checked only tradeindia.com. and it looks very bad. even the most basic stuf was not organized. check: http://www.seoptimer.com/report/products.tradeindia.com/558d55a88bd83#

Thank you Andy Had the same conclusion actually, was hoping their could be a magical trick Thanks anyways for your feedback

My thought make all links NoFollow or using this meta tag : Place between and  page you put links. For example : yoursite.com/tables.html

Fantastic, We'll take a look and get this running with them.  Thanks!

Hi Kristina, Thanks for that, I really appreciate it. I'll follow Rand's tweet for additional insights.

I am checking your schemas with https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ and it seems your product and review snippets are well implemented. We implemented them two years ago on a quite powerful ecommerce site, and it only appears for branded keywords. Having the schema is a must for appearing, but not enough for Google to show them. Luck and patience!

Thanks John, you have offered some real value into what I have been considering! Would love to chat more if possible! Working on backlinks at the moment blogger outreach etc

Thank you, Patrick! I'll check all of these out and share all aspects with the clients so they know what potentially lies ahead in terms of rebranding and using a new, different domain name. Really appreciate the article references too. - Patrick McCoy

Hi Patrick - Thanks. Your answer helped. I was getting  thrown off because developer tools wasn't showing the 301 redirect, but ScreamingFrog clearly validated what WebMaster tools reported which gave me enough to go back to Ops and have them investigate further! Thumbs UP!

Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website. If this is making many pages for each location, then I would worry about them.  However, if all of this information is on a single page then you might be fine.  If I owned a company like this I would require each location to give me substantive content. Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed? I republished two of my thin content pages last week.  These were noindexed for about two years.  They were upgraded from two or three sentences and one photo to nearly 1000 words and four or five photos.  One appeared in the index about five days later and went straight to #4 for a moderately difficult single word query.  That single word query is the name of a software product, the name of some type of "gold" in the minecraft video game and has a lot of competition from .gov and .edu. . The second one was published about eight days ago and we have not seen it in the SERPs yet.  This is an unusually long time for us to wait on a republished page for this site which has a DA of about 80. The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag. I have never done this.  I just republish the page.

Hey Massimliano, I responded to you over here too, but basically: Googlebot's user agent declares itself to be an iPhone, so I'd rel="alternate" over to your iphone.site.com version. Rel="alternate" is supposed to redirect based on the width of the screen, not the device type, so I don't know how you'd differentiate between your multiple rel="alternate"s otherwise. I've never heard of anyone using this set up before, so let us know how it goes! Kristina

Awesome, thanks EGOL, both of you answered my question, I see the competitor has the backlink with anchor text as this keyword! Thanks again!

Good advice here. I hope you're linking out too, when it's helpful to your audience.

Some companies have several in-house people working all day, every day on SEO. At my office we have three full time people.  Two of us (an employee and I) work almost full time making rain.  One person does fulfillment and customer service.  (Each week we also get a few hours of work from part time help, and we get a few hours per week of outside SEO consulting and programming). Honestly, I worry that we are not shoveling the coal fast enough.  There are companies out there if they took a mind to it they could completely crush us.

Thanks much appreciated Thanks for your help