Why is google not deindexing pages with the meta noindex tag?

[Matt-Williamson]

It all depends on how long it takes Google to re-crawl those pages with the no index tag on them.

I would do this along with the steps you have already taken in order to help speed the process up if you are in a hurry

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663419

[JGar-220371]

Yes it was around December 2nd or 3rd that we added the noindex tags.  It just seemed like google wasn't removing any pages yet from the index.  It did stop google from adding more of these pages though.

[JGar-220371]

In your experience how long does this normally take?

[MarieHaynes]

Streamline Metrics has got it right.

I've seen pages take MONTHS to drop out of the index after being noindexed.  It's best to use the URL removal tool in WMT (not to be confused with the disavow tool) to tell Google to not only deindex the pages but to remove them from the cache as well.  I have found that when you do this the pages are gone within 12 hours.

[JGar-220371]

Ok.  That makes sense.  I wonder why it takes so long?  I'll start the long process of the manual removal.

[MarieHaynes]

You can remove entire category directories from the index in one command using the tool.  But the urls won't be removed from the cache, just the index.  To remove them from the cache you'll need to enter each url individually.  I think that if you are trying to clear things up for Panda reasons, just removing from the index is enough.  However, I'm currently trying to decide if it will speed things up to remove from the cache as well.

[josh-riley]

The crawlers have so many billions of webpages to get to. We have more than 50,000 on our site; there's about 8,000 that they check more regularly than the others - some are just really deep on the site and hard to get to.

[JGar-220371]

This link almost makes it seem like I shouldn't use the webmaster tools removal.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119

[MarieHaynes]

I guess it depends on the urgency of your situation. If you were just trying to clean things up then it's okay to wait for Google to re-crawl and solve the problem. But if you have been affected by panda and your site is not ranking then I personally would consider that an urgent enough need to use the tool.

[NikolasNikolaou]

Google might have already crawled the pages but not indexed them yet. Be patient , if you have enough links coming in and the pages are less than 3 levels deep they will all be crawled and indexed in no time.