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At present when I Google the domain name of the WordPress sites I have worked on, I receive at least three listings (often the top three).

The first listing is the only one I am interested in seeing, others appear from individual pages from that WordPress site i.e.:
1st hit - www.domain.com
2nd hit - www.domain.com/about
3rd hit - www.domain.com/designers

Does anybody know if its possible to remove all the links but the absolute www.domain.com?

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    Why in the world would you want to remove parts of your site from Google search results? You want LESS traffic?
    – Dan Grossman
    Commented Feb 11, 2011 at 10:45

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I'd personally tell the client that Google will display results however Google feels best serves its userbase

That's actually not entirely true. It is possible to have certain pages on your domain--while navigable--are not indexed in the various search engines. In addition to properly setting up your robots.txt, you can insert the following:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

in the head of any page you do not want indexed. Additionally, if you do not want the links to be crawled either, you would have it say NOFOLLOW instead of FOLLOW

Although these pages are cached right now, after a long period of no activity at that URI according to the crawlers, the listing should eventually drop. This only works on crawlers that play by the rules though, of course.

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  • Re: my quote at the top -- what you tell a client and what reality is are sometimes two different things. Building an atmosphere of trust with clients is important to prevent them from continually asking stupid questions -- the route where you're able to say "It just doesn't work like that" is preferable to the one where half an hour later you're still explaining technical minutiae, of which the client understands 0.5%. Yeah, you could put a robots meta tag at the top of every page except home, but you're not doing your job if you fail to explain to your client why this is a bad idea.
    – aendra
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 7:14
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Why in the world would you want to remove parts of your site from Google search results? You want LESS traffic?

That is exactly right. The more results the better. To answer your question, I don't think you can remove results, simply because, theoretically, no one would want to. Hope that helps.

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Technically, you could use robots.txt for telling search engines not to index content; see http://robotstxt.org

User-agent: *
Disallow: /about
Disallow: /designers

...And on. There's no "Allow" command, so you'll have to do this for every page they don't want in search results.

I'd personally tell the client that Google will display results however Google feels best serves its userbase, and this means it displays other pages from the site in a particular group of search results. If the client is arriving at this conclusion by Googling his/her company name, make sure to explain people very seldom arrive at content by searching the name of a particular company.

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  • This is probably over-kill for this problem. The use of per-page control using noindex, follow offers more granular influence.
    – Mike Hudson
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 4:50

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