Tell search engine that current text is temporary

Question

I have summary of my last articles on website first page and category pages. As you know this summaries are temporary and they're gone when new articles are published.

The problem is when I search title of some of those articles on Google, Google indexes me first page or category pages beside of the article page as a result.

How can I tell Google that this text is just a summary and it's gonna be gone after a while?

Answer 1

I would not recommend using the search console removal tool or the robots.txt file. The former is rather tedious and inefficient, I mean how many times you have to do that? while the later is not recommended, if another different page links to the category page your category page will be indexed.

Google knows pretty well when a content is referred from another page. They recommend using excerpts or a summary of your article in the homepage or category pages. Watch this video where Matt from Google explained it.

The best and more efficient way to manage the content of your category pages is to place the following meta robots tag in the head section:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

Or simply

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

This way Google will no index the page but will follow the links and index the individual posts. Read more about it here.

In regards to the homepage you don’t need to worry. In fact, it is good for the homepage to have content that sometimes gets updated.

Unless you are searching for that specific page, Google will assign the page rank accordingly and will determine the relevant authority to the original content. It will also understand that the homepage is referring or linking to an inner page.

Answer 2

Google indexing temporary content is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you wish for those pages to not show up you have a few options.

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools to request that your outdated content is removed or refreshed.

   From the Search Console Help page:

   What will a successful request do?

   If your request is successful:

   • Google will remove the snippet and cached copy from search results.
   • If the page is no longer available, it will remove the search result entirely.
   • If the page is still available, it will remove the currently cached version and snippet from search results. The page can still appear in search results, but without a snippet or cached version. The cached version and snippet will be refreshed in search results the next time Google's crawler visits the page.

2. Use a robots.txt file to block crawlers from the page. I do not recommend this unless you really do not want this page indexed. The line would look something like:

   User-agent: * 
   Disallow: /my-category-page/