How long does it take for tags to be deindexed?

  • Resolved passportsymphony

    (@dankiteski)


    4 years, 9 months ago

    I had more than 1,000 old tags that weren’t really doing anything and decided to deindex them a few months ago using Yoast’s de-index all tags option. Since then, I have even deleted the links, but most of them still are indexed on Google (there’s more than 1,000 when I check site:…./tag).

    My question here is: is the Yoast feature enough to de-index all tags or do I have to de-index all tags manually from Google too? Can I get in some kind of trouble because a lot of tags are indexed and leading to 404 pages right now even though I technically deindexed them (using Yoast) around 5 months ago?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hi @dankiteski,

    Thank you for reaching out!

    There is no fixed timeframe to get links out of the index, but when the tag archive pages all are 404s, they should get removed out of the index. Can you share a specific URL so we can check?

    Furthermore, are you sure that links to those pages on your site are totally removed as well?

    Thread Starter passportsymphony

    (@dankiteski)

    Hi Jeroen,

    thank you for your quick response. Yeah, sure. Here’s one example: https://passportsymphony.com/tag/uzbekistan/. When I do a search for site:passportsymphony.com/tag this is the first thing that appears but there are a lot of others too. All of them lead to 404 pages.

    When I put any of these tags in my Webmaster Inspect URL tool, I get a result that ‘URL is on Google’ (Indexed but not submitted in sitemap). However, when I choose ‘live testing URL’, it shows that the link does lead to a 404 error.

    As per your questions, this is how I de-indexed the tags. I went to Yoast–> Search Appearance–>Tags–>Show Tags in search results? -NO; SEO Title- EMPTY, Meta Description- EMPTY; Yoast Metabox- HIDE.

    Is that how it should be done?

    Hi @dankiteski,

    Thank you for your reply and for giving more context.

    We do see that the tag pages have 404 headers so that should mean they should be dropped off eventually. We suggest not to worry about this as your potential audiences do not use ‘site searches’. We suggest focussing on optimizing other aspects of your site.

    While we checked your site pages, we see that the paging part of the blog archive pages is using Javascript to reload new content and the URL stays the same, with Javascript off and testing /page/2 on an archive, it returns the first page too. This is not default behavior and might need adjustments to optimize crawling of your blogs and your site in general.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jeroen Rotty.
    Thread Starter passportsymphony

    (@dankiteski)

    I see. Okay, thank you for your response, Jeroen, and for the helpful tip. I’ll take a look into this one too.

    Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    @dankiteski You’re welcome. We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved but please let us know if you require any further assistance.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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