Hide sitelinks from Google search results

[MainstreamMktg]

Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide.

I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[seoelevated]

For an html page, you would include the following line in the HEAD section of the page:

But in your question, I am unclear if you are maybe trying to noindex the sitemap itself? If that is the case, if you are wanting to direct Google to not index an XML file (rather than an html page), in theory you could inject a X-Robots-Tag: noindex into the header for the sitemap file (google how to do that). But probably no need to do that.

[MainstreamMktg]

Hi There,

Thanks so much for your reply. The trick with this is that the page that is showing as a sitelink is not even part any of the website's sitemaps. We just rebuilt the website for the client about 3 months ago - went from static website to Wordpress and for some unknown reason - Google is remembering a .php link from the old website somehow, but it is nowhere in our FTP, so if you click on it - it provides a 404 error.

The other disadvantage is that the old website was never SEO'ed or had proper page titles so users are confusing that sitelink as the new website link and it goes to a 404 page and people think the website isn't working.

Have I explained a bit better? Does that change your suggestion? Thanks!

[seoelevated]

Ah. So, then I might try one of the following:

• My preferred approach would be to set up a redirect for that URL to a valid new URL. That way, you would make the best use of the traffic coming from the Sitelink, for whatever time it might remain there. After a while, I suspect Google will either update the sitelink title and description with those from the new redirected page, or perhaps drop that sitelink eventually in favor of another page.
• If you can't do the above (maybe you are not able to set up redirects from the old URL), then I might go the route of using the Search console (old version) to request removal of the old URL (Google Index > Remove URLs). If it really does give a proper 404 response code, then this should work. It doesn't do the job on its own if the URL still gives a valid response code. But a 404 plus a removal should get rid of it. That said, then you are rolling the dice with whatever Google decides to promote as a replacement sitelink. So, I would prefer the first approach, if I thought I could make the best of the traffic coming from that link.

[MainstreamMktg]

Yes, I tried the old Search Console option before I posted in here but sadly, it just redirects you back to the new version. However, I didn't even think about the redirect opportunity and considering the website is built on Wordpress, that should be easy enough to set up.

Thanks so much!