On Friday while at work, I took my normal 2 pm stroll down the administrative hall for a candy and caffeine fix. On my way, I stopped by the campus announcement board and checked out what was happening on campus. As my wife works in the Communications department at the same school, I checked for the mandatory “Posted by Communications” stamp required to be on the fliers. For once, they all were stamped.
I continued on toward my sugary reward for a hard day’s work, when I stopped this (right) table display of menus.
I scratched my head as I’ve seen local businesses advertise on our campus before, but my continued walked revealed more of these displays. Six more of these displays to be exact. And refrigerator magnets.
Seriously? Is this how your market yourself? You send an under-paid menu delivery boy out for his daily rounds and instead, dumps his entire stash at a university? You pay him to deliver these menus to households where families will put them on their refrigerators and tempt them on Friday nights. Instead, he put them in the administrative hall of a university. The concept works. But he didn’t put them in the dorms – where the students are! Continue reading ‘Pizzaman, if you had just asked!’
For once in my life I don’t want Google to index me. I’m not crazy. Seriously! Our goals and strategies in SEO are to get our pages indexed, to help our users find what we have, and to turn a profit.
Clients often think that that once Google has you in their index that everything is fine. That users can find what they are looking for. And how could they not? Everything we write is relevant once they type the magic words in that search box. Wrong.
One of my biggest tasks has been to trim down an over-sized and deep linked website. I primarily work for a university whose site has multiple target audiences; Prospects, alumni, donors, community members. Each audience needs a highly refined section of the website outlined by navigation. But again, there are extremely too many pages to manage as landing pages. My mission is to remove as many pages as possible from the Google index that are not relevant to the end user, as quickly as I can.
Waiting on Google is not an option.
Over two weeks ago I proposed a theory that used Google’s Sitemap tool in the unindexing of specific pages in a client’s website. The theory is that by submitting a sitemap to Google with a list of URLS I could streamline the index or reindexing of a page. I set my desired pages to NOINDEX and waited. I waited and waited, and waited.
From my scientific observations, I would say this doesn’t work.
The index of my observed directory stayed the same. I’m assuming that Google continues to hit the URLs listed in the sitemap, ignoring the NOINDEX page tag. Manual removal of the URLs via the Webmasters Tools works, but the prospect of directly submitting a mass list of URLs thrills me.
For now I guess I’ll have to settle with copying and pasting. Only 350 more URLs to go.
*sigh*
Why didn’t someone tell me I could remove my web pages from the Google index? I mean seriously! I’ve been playing with Google’s Webmaster Tools for over a year now, and I just discovered this?
On Tuesday, I attempted to use Google’s Webmaster Tools as a reverse index. Why? Because I can’t submit any more URLs via the Webmaster Tools (but that’s another post).
My theory stands at this:
Google uses user provided sitemap files as a starting point to index a web site. Often used for large and deep sites, the sitemap allows those in charge to submit a list directly to Google for indexing. I want to use it to tell Google what NOT to index.
So how am I going to send Google my list of pages to remove index from?
Simple…I use a sitemap file. I have submitted a sitemap via Webmaster Tools that contains the following:
- 14 URLs in a subdirectory
- 4 of 14 URLs are legitimate pages Google to index
- 10 of 14 URLs are marked as NOINDEX
My goal is by the end of next week to have a subdirectory with only 4 pages indexed in it. Currently, they are all indexed.
Here’s to hoping, and hopefully results soon enough…
