Hi, my wordpress blog has 10k posts, I installed SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 and my traffic went sky high but also my indexed page count went up to 40k, found out about it only after a while. So then my traffic started to go down and so did my position in SERP. Now I have 40k indexed pages and shitty rank position. I've remade my robots.txt to this Code: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-* Disallow: */feed* Disallow: /comments Disallow: /author Disallow: /tag Disallow: /archives Disallow: /20* Disallow: /iframes Disallow: /privacy-policy.html Disallow: /web-site-agreement.html Disallow: /category/*/* Disallow: */trackback* User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: *.php Disallow: /*.js$ Disallow: /*.inc$ Disallow: /*.css$ Disallow: /*.gz$ Disallow: /*.wmv$ Disallow: /*.cgi$ Disallow: /*.xhtml$ Disallow: /*.xlsx $ Disallow: /*.doc$ Disallow: /*.pdf$ Disallow: /*.zip$ User-agent: * Allow: /images Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz Any suggestions on how to minimize indexed page count and speed the process up? Will that benefit my SERP? Thanks!
Same thing happened to me. I recommend you to delete all unnecessary pages and set 410 error, not 404. This will work much quicker than 404
Your traffic might also be going down because the tags plugin injected a whole ton of linked keywords onto all your pages and Google considers it keyword stuffing. Instead of tags, consider something like YARPP (yet another related posts plugin), reducing your internal backlinking to only categories and the 5 most related posts works great for me. I do have some sites where tags make sense for visitors, on those sites I follow,noindex. If you noindex your tags, be prepared to wait about 6 months for Google to get rid of them all out of the index. They like to drag their feet on that.
