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Indexing was easy but not de-indexing

by eugie17
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have started a new site a month a go, I made some design mistakes and found that google has indexed about 600 empty pages of my site (which is very bad after panda), I am having very bad rankings and I think this is the reason behind it. I have added about 50 origianl content pages and made all empty pages return 404 (which is the fastest way according to Matt Cutts) now it's been 20 days since I added the 404 response and Not even one page is removed from the index???!!!!

When I login to WMT I see 180 pages as not found (returning 404) but all of them are in the index, is there any way to speed up de-indexing of unwanted pages, they are really hurting my ranking.
#deindexing #easy #indexing
  • Profile picture of the author phoenikz
    Use robots.txt rule
    disallow your unwanted pages
    Signature

    /looking for new business/

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  • Profile picture of the author Leede
    As phoenikz suggested the robots.txt will help you to deindex unwanted pages from google search. It takes some to re-crawl but the pages removed from there. Try this and let us know your feedback.
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    • Profile picture of the author eugie17
      Originally Posted by Leede View Post

      As phoenikz suggested the robots.txt will help you to deindex unwanted pages from google search. It takes some to re-crawl but the pages removed from there. Try this and let us know your feedback.
      What do you think of this blog post from mattcutts.com

      Overdoing url removals

      If you have a lot of urls that you don't want in Google anymore, you can make the pages return a 404 and wait for Googlebot to recrawl/reindex the pages. This is often the best way. You can also block out an entire directory or a whole site in robots.txt and then use our url removal tool to remove the entire directory from Google's search results.
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