Quickest way to deindex large parts of a website

[Online-Marketing-Guy]

Hey there,

my clients website was set up with subdirectories for almost every country in the world plus multiple languages in each country. The content in each subfolder is (almost) identical. So no surprise: They have a big problem with duplicate content and ranking fluctuations.

Since they don't want to change the site's structure I recommended limiting the languages available in each subfolder with robots.txt. However before doing this we marked the contents to be exluded with noindex, nofollow. It's only been 2 days now but I hardly notice any decline in the number of indexed pages.

I was therefore wondering if it would speed up things if I marked the pages with just noindex instead of noindex and nofollow.

It would be great if you could share your thoughts on that.

Cheers,

Jochen

Hey there,
my clients website was set up with subdirectories for almost every country in the world plus multiple languages in each country. The content in each subfolder is (almost) identical. So no surprise: They have a big problem with duplicate content and ranking fluctuations.
Since they don't want to change the site's structure I recommended limiting the languages available in each subfolder with robots.txt. However before doing this we marked the contents to be exluded wiht noindex, nofollow. It's only been 2 days now but I hardly notice any decline in the number of indexed pages.
I was therefore wondering if it would speed up things if I marked the pages with just noindex instead of noindex and nofollow.
It would be great if you could share your thoughts on that.
Cheers,Jochen

[DirkC]

Hi,

There was a similar question a few days ago: https://moz.com/community/q/is-there-a-limit-to-how-many-urls-you-can-put-in-a-robots-txt-file

Quote: Google Webmaster Tools has a great tool for this. If you go into WMT and select "Google index", then "remove URLs". You can use regex to remove a large batch of URLs then block them in robots.txt to make sure they stay out of the index.

Dirk

[Online-Marketing-Guy]

Thanks for the hint Dirk! I've used the tool and it works great. I even found a handy chrome extension ("WebMaster Tools - Bulk URL removal") that made the removal of my 3,000 subdirectories very smooth and saved me about 25 hours of manual work!

WebMaster Tools - Bulk URL removal