Tens of duplicate homepages indexed and blocked later: How to remove from Google cache?

[vtmoz]

Hi community,

Due to some WP plugin issue, many homepages indexed in Google with anonymous URLs. We blocked them later. Still they are in SERP. I wonder whether these are causing some trouble to our website, especially as our exact homepages indexed. How to remove these pages from Google cache? Is that the right approach?

Thanks

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi again vtmoz!

1. Make sure that they are not created in the first place
2. Make sure that they are not in the sitemap
3. Go to search console and remove any you do not want - it will say temporary removal but they will not come back if they are not in the structure or the sitemap.

More:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

Note: Always self canonicalize the home page to stop versions with UTM codes (created by Facebook, Twitter etc) appearing in SERPS

Regards

Nigel

[effectdigital]

+1 for "Make sure that they are not created in the first place" haha

[effectdigital]

It's likely that  you don't have access to edit the coding on these weird plugin URLs. As such, normal techniques like using a Meta no-index tag in the HTML may be non-viable.

You could use the HTTP header (server level stuff) to help you out. I'd advise adding two strong directives to the afflicted URLs through the HTTP header so that Google gets the message:

1. Use the X-Robots deployment of the no-index directive on the affected URLs, at the HTTP header (not the HTML) level. That linked pages tells you about the normal HTML implementation, but also about the X-Robots implementation which is the one you need (scroll down a bit)

2. Serve status code 410 (gone) on the affected URLs

That should prompt Google to de-index those pages. Once they are de-indexed, you can use robots.txt to block Google from crawling such URLs in the future (which will stop the problem happening again!)

It's important to de-index the URLs before you do any robots.txt stuff. If Google can't crawl the affected URLs, it can't find the info (in the HTTP header) to know that it should de-index those pages

Once Google is blocked from both indexing and crawling these pages, they should begin to stop caching them too

Hope that helps

[Nigel_Carr]

Good solid advice

They can be created in any number of ways but it's normally simple enough to specify the preferred URL on the server then move any variations in htaccess, such as those with www (if the none www is preferred), those with a trailing slash at the end etc.

The self canonical on all will sort out any other duplicates.

As for getting rid of them - the search console way is the quickest. If they don't exist after that then the won't be reindexed unless they are linked from somewhere else. In such cases, they will 301 from htaccess so it shouldn't be a problem.

if you 410 you will lose any benefit from those links going to the pages and it's a bad experience for a visitor. Always 301 do not 410 if it is a version.

410s are fine for old pages you never want to see in the index again but not for a home page version.

Regards

Nigel

[effectdigital]

It is assuredly true that, just like in any number of fields (medicine) - in SEO, prevention is better than cleanup based methodology. If your website doesn't take its medicine, you get problems like this one

I think your advice here was really good

[Nigel_Carr]

Thanks!

A agree - I have just done a similar clean up by:

1. Don't let them be created
2. Redirect all previous versions!

One site I just worked on had 8 versions of the home page! lol

http
https
/index.php
/index.php/

A mess!

We stopped them all being created and 301'd all versions just in case they were indexed anywhere or linked externally.

Cheers

[vtmoz]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to use "Remove URLs" tool from GSC. They have been created due to a bug in the Yoast SEO plugin. Very unfortunate and we paid for no mistake from our end.

Removing from SERP means removing from Google index also? Or Google will still consider them and just stops showing us? My intention is: Anyway we blocked them, but whether they will cause some distraction to our ranking efforts being there in results being cached.

Thanks