De-indexing pages and checking with Google's site: command

Question

I am trying to de-index a certain url from google, but for some reason it just isn't working.

I added this snippet:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"/>

To this page:

http://www.comehike.com/outdoors/parks/edit_park_topic.php?park_id=55621&topic_id=1&topic_name=General%20Information&park_name=Kings%20Canyon%20National%20Park

And generally the page edit_park_topic.php which you can view source and see the no-index snippet.

For some reason it isn't de-indexing those pages because if you search this in google: site:comehike.com/outdoors/parks/edit_park_topic.php - it will show almost 200,000 results. And it is actually adding pages since before it was less than that.

Is the site: directive showing only the indexed pages or all of them? How can I get those pages de-indexed? Also, for the panda update, do you think having the 200k pages with that form will be damaging? I already got hit by panda for having other violations which I resolved, but my traffic had not come back, and I just discovered recently this form of which there are 200k urls.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are pages in Google's index that were crawled on 10th August that do not have the noindex metatag. So you probably just need to be patient and wait for the Googlebot to recrawl your page.

However, if you want to request a removal of certain pages from the index, you can do this through Google Webmaster Tools [instructions]:

If you own the site

• Verify your ownership of the site in Webmaster Tools.

• On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.

• On the Dashboard, click Site configuration in the left-hand navigation.

• Click Crawler access, and then click Remove URL.
• Click New removal request.
• Type the URL of the page you want removed from search results (not the Google search results URL or cached page URL), and then click Continue. How to find the right URL. Note that the URL is case-sensitive—you will need to submit the URL using exactly the same characters and the same capitalization that the site uses.
• Click Remove page from search results and cache.
• Click Submit Request.

From here:

• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734