How do you deindex legal pages, categories pages, and tags?

tazarbm

tazarbm

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Hi,

I just google-checked all of my sites with the "site:" operator and I noticed that the legal pages (contact, about us, privacy policy, disclaimer, etc), the category pages and sometimes even the tags show up in google's index and I'd like to remove them from there. But I don't know how to do this anymore because I've stopped using SEO plugins at the beginning of this year.

In hindsight, this may have not be a good idea (and I will probably fix it soon), but I will definitely not be using the AIOSEO plugin again given how bad it's become. So, feel free to also recommend (free, obviously) replacements for this plugin cause I've lost track lately of all the new tools and plugins that have popped up in our industry.

If I'm going to use another SEO plugin that handles the noindexing aspect well it will probably only work for new / future websites, but how do I deindex the pages of the old websites? Does anyone know?

Thanks a bunch! :)
 
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If you don't want to use plugins, you can create a child theme and add noindex tag to the header.php manually.
Code: 
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

You can then use conditions and only display it on pages that are supposed to be noindexed. REF: https://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

Alternatively, many search engines respect robots.txt so you can just block them that way.
 
You can ask GSC to deindex those pages as the owner of the site - no one else can do that if the pages are already indexed
Next time use nofollow for those pages from start
 
tiiberius said:
If you don't want to use plugins, you can create a child theme and add noindex tag to the header.php manually.
Code: 
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

You can then use conditions and only display it on pages that are supposed to be noindexed. REF: https://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

Alternatively, many search engines respect robots.txt so you can just block them that way.
Click to expand...
Thanks :)

Regarding robots.txt... will Google deindex those things if I add the rules to robots.txt so late (basically one year after the pages have been indexed)?

GenesisOne said:
You can ask GSC to deindex those pages as the owner of the site - no one else can do that if the pages are already indexed
Next time use nofollow for those pages from start
Click to expand...
you mean noindex??
 
GenesisOne said:
I mean Google DE-indexes the pages (delete those pages from its database)
De-index = after being indexed
No-index = before being indexed
Click to expand...
you said "Next time use nofollow for those pages from start". That's what I replied to with "you mean noindex??" :)
 
tazarbm said:
Regarding robots.txt... will Google deindex those things if I add the rules to robots.txt so late (basically one year after the pages have been indexed)?
Click to expand...
That's a good point.

It is likely they will keep it indexed and just change the snippet text.

You might be better off with straight noindex.
 
tiiberius said:
That's a good point.

It is likely they will keep it indexed and just change the snippet text.

You might be better off with straight noindex.
Click to expand...

I thought so...

Thanks for the tips, man :)
 
I would say that you should avoid using robots.txt,
blocking the path in there will simply block the crawlers from crawling both of the categories & tags pages,
these can be really useful for link juice flowing and it will simply be a waste

Setting them to noindex will require you to use some plugin which is the easiest path, Yoast or Rank Math should easily do the work,
You can also make a child theme as @tiiberius suggested or use htaccess to set custom header to these paths
 
This is also known as the page's header. Just open the source code for the web page you want to deindex. Then, paste the tag into a new line within the <head> section of the HTML. Here's what the tag for both noindex and nofollow looks like within the header.
 
tazarbm said:
Hi,

I just google-checked all of my sites with the "site:" operator and I noticed that the legal pages (contact, about us, privacy policy, disclaimer, etc), the category pages and sometimes even the tags show up in google's index and I'd like to remove them from there. But I don't know how to do this anymore because I've stopped using SEO plugins at the beginning of this year.

In hindsight, this may have not be a good idea (and I will probably fix it soon), but I will definitely not be using the AIOSEO plugin again given how bad it's become. So, feel free to also recommend (free, obviously) replacements for this plugin cause I've lost track lately of all the new tools and plugins that have popped up in our industry.

If I'm going to use another SEO plugin that handles the noindexing aspect well it will probably only work for new / future websites, but how do I deindex the pages of the old websites? Does anyone know?

Thanks a bunch! :)
Click to expand...
Why do you want to remove these pages from the index?
 
jackpoc said:
Why do you want to remove these pages from the index?
Click to expand...
because of duplicate content issues. Also because no one needs to see the privacy policy or disclaimer pages... or even the tag pages if I think better.
 
tazarbm said:
because of duplicate content issues. Also because no one needs to see the privacy policy or disclaimer pages... or even the tag pages if I think better.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't worry about this. Unless you have validated that you have a duplicate content issue affecting rankings?

Google crawls billions of legal pages, privacy policies, pages that get zero traffic. They're used to that.

Tags and categories are important for crawling IMO. Esp for larger sites and passing pagerank throughout. Indexing those types of pages encourages this.

I see more problems caused by trying to block or noindex content than I see benefits of doing stuff like this.
 
even if you are right I still want those pages gone from the index. It irks me.

But thanks for the advice, I appreciate it... and I might go with it :)
 
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