Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?

[yacpro13]

Hello,

7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed.

Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters?

I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed.

Thanks.

[josh-riley]

A week isn't very long. It can take Google months to recrawl and drop URLs from an index. Google will figure it out, you just need to give it time. If you haven't done so, update your sitemap to include the tagged pages and resubmit via Google. That will signal them to recrawl your site and could speed up the process.

[yacpro13]

Hi Andrea,

yep - we did that.
7 days ago, we implemented the canonical tags because URLs such as

www.example.com/widget?color=blue
www.example.com/widget?size=large

were being indexed, along with the 'real' URL

www.example.com/widget

We resubmitted the sitemap (which has all the 'real' URLs) as well.

At this time, many URLs with parameters are still indexed. I guess after reading this article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

I was expecting the change to happen a little quicker...

I just want to confirm no other action is needed on our part.
I understand canonical tags would tell the crawlers which page to index when it finds them for the first time, but I also wanted to confirm that if all URLs are already indexed (because, at the time, no canonical tags were present) implementing the tags would be enough to have the unwanted URLs removed automatically from the index.

[edwardrj]

You have two options here:

Let Google sort it out (which they will -- but it may take time)

Remove the unnecessary URLs yourself via Webmaster Tool's URL removal tool.

[yacpro13]

Thanks.

I think I will monitor for the next 2-3 weeks, and if there still is a lot of unwanted URLS with parameters in the index, I will start requesting removals.