Questions
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Quickest way to deindex a large number of pages
Given that I'm sure you've removed these pages from your site, there will be no page to which to add a meta-noindex tag. Disallowing these pages in robots.txt in no way signals to the search engines that they should be removed from the index, just that they should no longer be crawled. Given that they're already indexed, blocking in robots.txt would potentially save some "crawl budget" but wouldn't do anything to remove them from the index. So submitting them to the URL Removal Tool would be by far the most effective, along with an explanation. You'll also want to keep a very close watch on your penalty warnings within Webmaster Tools. If you get flagged, you'll want a complete history of the issue and the steps you've taken to address it in order to prepare a reinclusion request. Lastly, don't forget to submit these same URLs to the Bing Webmaster Tools Block URLs tool. You may not get a massive amount of traffic from Bing, but there's no sense throwing it away, since you've already prepared the URL removal list anyway. Hope that helps? Paul
Search Engine Trends | | ThompsonPaul0 -
Webmaster tools - Restricted by robots.txt
Hi Sandeep. While I see it commonly used, "Allow" is not a valid syntax for robots.txt file. You can confirm it with this validation tool: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml Since the code is not valid, I am not sure how Google will handle it. My best guess is you should be fine, but you can also use Google's robots.txt tool: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449&from=35237&rd=1 Any changes to your robots.txt file should be picked up immediately on the next crawl. Can you please share the specific dates involved when the pages were restricted by robots.txt? There is a good chance your site is fine now and you are looking at old records.
Technical SEO Issues | | RyanKent0 -
Meta tags disappeared in google?
Hi Steve, With regard to your meta description: <meta name="description" content="Fight a Denver Traffic Ticket. Ticketvoid fights your speeding ticket with the best Colorado Traffic Attorney. Beat traffic violations with a Denver Lawyer." /> Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Google will use the meta description that you specify. While it's frustrating, I have seen several instances where Google selects alternate text to use in place of the specified Meta description. Best, W
On-Page / Site Optimization | | Wayne760