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I want to de-index all the pages of my website except home page. This is because it is an exact match domain (EMD) and I'm getting traffic on website just because of Domain name.

I want to restart the website. How is it possible ?

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  • What do you mean by "restart the website"? Do you mean remove all the existing content and replace it with new content? Is this because of a penalty that Google applied to the domain or because a search algorithm negatively impacted it? Oct 3, 2014 at 13:26

4 Answers 4

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Try putting the following robots.txt in the root of your website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /$

Note that it will take time and that you can use Webmaster Tools to manually request their removal (this can speed up the process).

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Using a robots.txt file will not cause a pages to be de-indexed. It will just prevent search engines from crawling them. They can still be listed in the search results, though. To have pages removed from the index you need to use the x-robots-tag HTTP header:

x-robots-tag: noindex
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  • Are you sure about that? I recently managed to get a lot of URLs for our corporate website de-indexed by disallowing them via robots.txt It took about a month or so, but it worked.
    – Wexford
    Oct 3, 2014 at 14:37
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    YMMV. Google has stated, and it has been experienced, that they will include pages blocked by robots.txt in their search results if they feel it is worth doing so. The only way to explicitly remove a page, besides manual removal, is to use the x-robots.-tag HTTP header.
    – John Conde
    Oct 3, 2014 at 14:42
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Use the noindex meta tag <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on all pages except the Homepage. This will ensure all pages (other than the homepage) are removed from major search engines.

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If you are not in a hurry, set noindex noarchive on all your pages, except the home page, and let crawlers do their work progressively.

If you are in a hurry, block access in your robots.txt and use the remove URLs feature in Google Webmaster Tools too. You can use the Block URls feature in Bing too.

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