Best practice for deindexing large quantities of pages

[teddef]

We are trying to deindex a large quantity of pages on our site and want to know what the best practice for doing that is. For reference, the reason we are looking for methods that could help us speed it up is we have about 500,000 URLs that we want deindexed because of mis-formatted HTML code and google indexed them much faster than it is taking to unindex them unfortunately.

We don't want to risk clogging up our limited crawl log/budget by submitting a sitemap of URLs that have "noindex" on them as a hack for deindexing. Although theoretically that should work, we are looking for white hat methods that are faster than "being patient and waiting it out", since that would likely take months if not years with Google's current crawl rate of our site.

[Alick300]

Hi,

I have never tested the method that I'm sharing here. Please check once it might be helpful in your case.

https://www.searchcommander.com/how-to-bulk-remove-urls-google/

Thanks

[benesmartin]

Hey,

you might be interested in this thread for getting your question answered.

https://moz.com/community/q/quickest-way-to-deindex-a-large-number-of-pages

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

[LoganRay]

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any easy/fast way to do this. I just ran a test to see how long it take Google to actually obey a noindex tag, and it's taken a little over 2 months for them all to be removed. I had 2 WP blogs that I added the noindex tag to all category, tag, and author pages and monitored the index count 4 or 5 times per week by running site:example.com inurl:/category/ queries. There was a lot of fluctuation at the beginnning, but eventually took hold after about 2 months. On one of the sites, I did add an XML sitemap with only the noindexed URLs on it, submitted it via Search Console, but that didn't seem to have an impact on how quickly they were dropped out.

See the screenshot below of my plotting of indexed pages per subfolder:

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