How can I get unimportant pages out of Google?

[DennisForte]

Hi Guys,

I have a (newbie) question, untill recently I didn't had my robot.txt written properly so Google indexed around 1900 pages of my site, but only 380 pages are real pages, the rest are all /tag/ or /comment/ pages from my blog. I now have setup the sitemap and the robot.txt properly but how can I get the other pages out of Google? Is there a trick or will it just take a little time for Google to take out the pages?

Thanks!

Ramon

[PeteGregory]

It will take time, but you can help it along by using the url removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools.  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

[AlanBleiweiss]

There's no bulk page request form so you'd need to submit every URL one at a time, and even then it's not a guaranteed way.  You could consider gettting a canonical tag on those specific pages that provides a different URL from your blog, such as an appropriate category page, or the blog home page.  That could help speed things up, but canonical tags themselves are only "hints" to Google.

Ultimately it's a time and patience thing.

[Francisco_Meza]

I agree with Alan's reply. Try canonical 1st. If you don't see any change, remove the URLs in GWT.

[DennisForte]

Thanks guys for your answers....
Alan, do you mean that I place the tag below at all the pages that I want out of Google?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Yes.  It's only a secondary level aid, and not guaranteed, yet it could help speed up the process of devaluing those pages in Google's internal system.  If the system sees those, and cross-references to the robots.txt file it could help.

[j0a0vargas]

For you remove the pages you want, need to put a tag:
<meta< span="">name="robots" content="noindex">

If you want internal links and external relevance to pass on these pages, you put:
<meta< span="">name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

If you do the lock on robot.txt: only need to include the tag in the current urls, new search engines will index no.

In my opinion, I do not like using the google url remover. Because if someday you want to index these folders, will not, at least it has happened to me.

The noindex tag works very well to remove objectionable content, within 1 month or so now will be removed.</meta<></meta<>

[DennisForte]

Thanks Vargas, If I choose for noindex, I should remove it from the robot.txt right?

I understood that if you have a noindex tag on the page and as well a dissallow in the robot.txt the SE will index it, is that true?

[j0a0vargas]

No, sorry. What I said is, if you mark the folder as disalow in robots.txt, it will not remove the pages are already indexed.

But the meta tag, when the spiders go again on the page and see that the pages are with the noindex tag will remove it.

Since you can not already include the directory on the robots.txt. Before removing the SE pages.

First you put the noindex tag on all pages you want to remove. After they are removed, it takes a week for a month. After you add the folders in robots.txt to your site who do not want to index.

After that,  you dont need to worry about the tags.

I say this because when you add in the robots.txt first, the SE does not read the page anymore, so they would not read the meta noindex tag. Therefore you must first remove the pages with noindex tag and then add in robot.txt

Hope this has helped.

João Vargas

[j0a0vargas]

No, sorry. What I said is, if you mark the folder as disalow in robots.txt, it will not remove the pages are already indexed.

But the meta tag, when the spiders go again on the page and see that the pages are with the noindex tag will remove it.

Since you can not already include the directory on the robots.txt. Before removing the SE pages.

First you put the noindex tag on all pages you want to remove. After they are removed, it takes a week for a month. After you add the folders in robots.txt to your site who do not want to index.

After that,  you dont need to worry about the tags.

I say this because when you add in the robots.txt first, the SE does not read the page anymore, so they would not read the meta noindex tag. Therefore you must first remove the pages with noindex tag and then add in robot.txt

Hope this has helped.

João Vargas

[KeriMorgret]

If you want to remove an entire directory, you can exclude that directory in robots.txt, then go to Google Webmaster Tools and request a URL removal. You'll have an option to remove an entire directory there.