This is actually very common; pages removed using the Google Search Console tool, are not not meant to be permanent. Google even lists this under the Remove URLs
tool section:
Remove URLs
To remove content permanently, you must remove or update the source
page. Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results.
The difficult part of what you are trying to do is de-index a page already indexed by Google. Once Google indexes a page, it doesn't like to let it go, even if you 404
or 410
the page, it will periodically over time come back and hit it just to see if the page has returned.
As long as you have the correct noindex
tags set, you should be fine. Over time Google and other Search Engines will de-index the page -- but the key here is time. You can combined the noindex
tags with the GSC Remove URLs
tool to have a more immediate effect.
What I would do is: go under the robots.txt Tester
section in the Google Search Console, and test one of the URLs you are trying to de-index from Google (such as your example.com/buy
). Assuming there are no conflicts, move on, if there are conflicts, address them with your robots.txt
file, as Google should be able to crawl the pages you are trying to de-index.
After confirming your robots.txt
is fine, I would then move on to making sure that I have either one or both the meta
(preferred) or header
tag configured properly on the pages you want de-indexed:
Using the robots meta tag (preferred)
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow
More info on these can be found here.
If all this is done, you should eventually see the pages permanently removed from the Search Engine's Indexes.
sitemap.xml
? Those pages should not appear in thesitemap.xml
either if you have one. Google gets "confused" if a page is in the sitemap and has a noindex flag.