Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
-
Hi folks,
A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results.
We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this.
I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future.
Thanks.
-
Just to let you know that the page was indexed in less than 24hrs. We didn't use Tony's tiip (share on G+) but we did all the following:
- Used GWT tool - fetch as googlebot
- Submit the URL using the button that appears after fetching as googlebot
- Included some sidewide links to the page
- Included the page in our sitemap.xml
Thanks all folks who added some insights and tips!
-
Thanks for the tip Tony! We didn't try this yet.
-
Depends on the site, if the site is Microsoft.com with a link from the home page, you can expect it to appear same day.
If its on boringoldsite.com then it could take a week or more.
But mostly a few days -
You can do two things in Google Webmaster tools to identify how long it will take for a page to index or even speed up the process of re indexation:
- Use Google's crawl rate and indexation reports
2) google tools fetch as googlebot
-
Hi Fabio,
Share the page in question on G+. Indexation of G+ posts (including links) can be as quick as 1/2 hour. Also make sure the website is linked to from the clients main G+ profile as a custom link.
-
We had a sub domain website (very small... four or five pages) that was blocked via the robots.txt file for two or three years. When we decided to have it indexed I did just what you did; fetch via GWT and clicked the button to add it to the index. This worked and then the next day... or maybe two days later, it was gone. I did this a couple of times...
It didn't hit the index and stick for two weeks. But since then everything has been just fine.
-
One of my competitors had a designer put a new look on their website. As soon as they uploaded it we went to the site to sniff the code. We saw that the developer left the "noindex" on all of the files. We laughed and laughed about that. Within a few days their entire site dropped out of search and it took them a couple weeks to figure out what happened while we enjoyed a big increase in sales. But, when they uploaded the site with the noindex removed, within a few days the pages were mostly back in search and two weeks later they were back to normal.
The amount of time required is influenced by the amount of spider action received by the site. If your site has low PageRank and does not receive a lot of spider action you can go much longer without being reindexed. Deep pages on a site without much spider action can take weeks to come back. The site in the example above is a PR6 site with mostly PR3 and PR4 pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Negative SEO & How long does it take for Google to disavow
Following on from a previous problem of 2 of our main pages completely dropping from index, we have discovered that 150+ spam, porn domains have been directed at our pages (sometime in the last 3-4 months, don't have an exact date). Does anyone have exerpeince on how long it may take Google to take noticed of a new disavow list? Any estimates would be very helpful in determining our next course of action.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vuly1 -
Search console validation taking a long time?
Hello! I did something dumb back in the beginning of September. I updated Yoast and somehow noindexed a whole set of custom taxonomy on my site. I fixed this and then asked Google to validate the fixes on September 20. Since then they have gotten through only 5 of the 64 URLS.....is this normal? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be doing. Thank you! ^_^
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
How long does it take for google to update title and metadata?
I updated my site's title and description about a week ago, however for some reason it's still not reflected in google search results. Here's my site and try searching for 'shopious directory'. Any idea why this is? I tried looking at webmaster tool and it seems that google didn't have any errors. Why is it still showing the old data?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | herlamba0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0