SEO isn’t all about getting as many pages as you can indexed. Sometimes pages with no value or old pages with out of date information can do more harm than good to a website owner.
I was recently looking at a website that had lots of old pages indexed in Google. The website owner had been getting lots of leads from people who had been finding his old pages and using old phone numbers and quoting old prices at him. He could not work out how these people were finding the old pages.
I explained that whilst the old pages weren’t available via his navigation, Google had already indexed them and because they hadn’t been deleted from his server, Google was still finding them as valid pages.
He also had a selection of pages with no text and single images – which were perfectly valid for the website but are never going to rank for anything so we decided to stop Google indexing these too.
In order to stop people finding these pages I uploaded a robots.txt file that disallows the search engines from visiting these files. I then went to Google Webmasters and selected Site Configuration > Crawler Access > Remove URL. For the individual pages, I just added several removal requests. The removal request is a two step process the first step asks for the URL you wish to remove and the second step asks you to confirm that the page either returns a 404 status or is blocked in the robots.txt.
Crucially though, in terms of speed of removing lots of pages – step two also has a “Reason” drop down box. Previously I’ve been ignoring the “Reason” box because the default option is “Remove page from search results and cache” which always seems to be the option I’m looking for but today my colleague (Hi Pete) showed me that if I selected the drop down box, the option to remove directory is there, hence speeding up the whole process if you have a whole directory of images you want to remove.
How fantastically efficient.
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