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I have 1230 urls that have been submitted to google by previous webmaster that should have never submitted all these pages are is just a image and should not show in search, these pages are relevant to the site and need to stay in place but i need google to not crawl them.

what is the best plan in removing these pages from searches, would the best option be to remove from site map and wait for the site to eventually crawl?

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  • Submitting a URL isn't the only (or even best) way to get it indexed. Google also finds URLs by crawling and indexes those. Those URLs could have been indexed whether or not they were submitted. Similarly, your sitemap has little to no bearing on which URLs Google chooses to index. What Googlebot can crawl is much more important than what is in your sitemap.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Nov 25, 2019 at 13:37
  • I understand that you don't want them indexed, but do you really not want them crawled either? If you prevent crawling, they could still get indexed in some rare cases. If you prevent indexing, you need to let them get crawled.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Nov 25, 2019 at 13:38
  • Thank you for your reply @StephenOstermiller, if we remove them from our sitemap would this not cause crawl errors
    – Brad Holmes
    Nov 25, 2019 at 15:06
  • You should remove them from your sitemap, but that won't stop Google from crawling or indexing them. The only way it will cause crawl errors is if you remove the pages.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Nov 25, 2019 at 17:00

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