Doubleminded

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*