Getting indexed after removing meta noindex, Google

Question

My question is, will my pages be indexed now in Google if they had <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> in the past, since they were created? Of course, now they are <meta name="robots" content="index" />. If yes, then how long it will take to have them in Google?

To give you some background, I'm making a site with the manual translation of some text to another language. This surely takes time, and I want to run the site already, having non-translated pages (with the Google machine translation option) along with completed translated ones. My idea is to block indexing of non-translated pages, so they appear to curious people, while not obstructing search engine index. After I get to some particular page, I translate it and change noindex to index. Is that a good idea?

Answer 1

I think you are on the correct track. I would keep a "no index" tag on the auto-translated pages.

Here is some more info

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html

Also a video from Matt Cutts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY

Answer 2

Sign up for Google webmaster tools.

Submit your site index. Make sure it gets updated every time you change a page to indexable

If Google doesn't read and index the page in a month, go to the Diagnostics section in Google Webmaster tools and submit the page to the Fetch as Googlebot function. After a successful retrieval, you can click on "Submit to Google Index". You have 50 Fetches and 10 submissions per week, so this is best used for stuff that is truly stuck in limbo. It's helped do forced updates on rather egregious Google oversights I've had in the past.

Answer 3

Although using that index meta tag doesn't hurt, it's generally better to not use it at all since the search engines' default stance is "follow and index everything".

Anyway, once the page is available to index it can take anywhere from a few days to a few months, depending on how many new pages need to be indexed at once and how popular your site is. If the site has low traffic* then you will probably not get indexed too quickly.

As others said, create an XML sitemap and add the new pages to it when they are ready to be indexed.

I would also re-evaluate whether having the non-translated pages on your site is actually good for users. As an English speaker, it would look bad to me to see a site mostly in English but then have random pages in a language I don't speak. (One idea: auto-translate those pages into your chosen language and let Google index them. Then it has an idea of the content and you can go back and improve the translation later.)

_{* Note, Google doesn't know your actual traffic stats, I mean whether from their point of view if the site appears in many search results.}

Answer 4

Submit an updated sitemap using the Google webmasters tools, then if all goes well, it will show up in 1 month.