: How do I remove a LOT of indexed pages from Google? A few weeks ago we have figured out that Google has indexed some information we would rather keep in some confidentiality, in the format
A few weeks ago we have figured out that Google has indexed some information we would rather keep in some confidentiality, in the format of individual PDF files. Our assumption was that this was a problem with our robots.txt we had overlooked. Even though we are not sure whether or not this is the case, we are certain that the robots.txt file is in a valid format and is, according to Google's webmaster tools, blocking the files.
However, even after this adjustment that has been made weeks ago, Google still has the PDF files indexed, but does tell us further information cannot be provided due to the robots.txt file being present. As you can hopefully understand, this is unwanted behaviour due to the nature of the documents. I am aware that there is a request page being provided by Google for this purpose, but there are a lot of files. Is there an easier way to get Google to remove all of the files from its search engine? If not, is there anything else you could advise us to do besides manually requesting Google to remove every single page?
More posts by @Steve110
3 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
You can include meta tag namely no index, no follow or else you can exclude with disallow with the robots. txt.
As mentioned in the comments, robots.txt only blocks crawling of files, it wont remove them from the SERPs.
To remove PDF files from the SERPs add an X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the HTTP header used to serve the file. They’ll drop out over time if you use the X-Robot-Tag with the noindex directive, or as mentioned you can speed up the removal process in GWT. Although if removing in GWT, you dont need to add the X-Robots-Tag if they are already blocked in robots.txt
Terms of Use Create Support ticket Your support tickets Stock Market News! © vmapp.org2024 All Rights reserved.