No luck with noindex,nofollow and robots.txt

Old URL not removed after 8 month.

[Yidaki]

My niche directory used to have urls starting with /dir/. I changed that about eight months ago. The old "/dir/..." pages have meta tags "noindex,nofollow" and a valid robots.txt entry since 8 month. But one of the pages is still listed at google.

In the past the urls were:
google.com/dir/bird_cages_designer/

Since eight months they are:
google.com/bird_cages_designer.htm

Currently isted at google is:

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Bird Cages Designer
Here is a nice description of the site. Learn about the Bird Cages history, view our Designs, order new Designer Birdcages from spain.
google.com/bird_cages_designer.htm - 12k - 15 Mar 2003 - Cached - Similar pages

• google.com/dir/bird_cages_designer/
  Similar pages
  [ More results from google.com ]

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How do i get the second listing removed?

- Should i fill a removal request in addition to the robots.txt entry to force gbot to read the robots.txt file again?
- Should i configure my server to return a 404 instead of a 200 Ok status code?
- Should i redirect to the "new" url and let the server return the 301 status code?

[jimbeetle]

Hi Yidaki,

From what I know, in order to get Google to remove a page from the index it has to return a 404.

In your page's case, since Google already knew about the page the robots.txt and robots meta will basically have no effect since it still thinks the page is there.

And though Google says [google.com] that robots "noindex,nofollow" tags are enough to remove pages from the index this does not always hold true. The bot might not spider the page or follow the links, but it knows it's there and quite often lists it.

Let Google see a 404 and, if you must, file a removal request.

Jim

[Blade]

I still have a website listed with google that ended 3 years ago! Only yesterday did I find this again so I submitted the dead url for spidering. Hopefully that will be gone soon. Just shows some sites still slip by the google refresh update.

[Yidaki]

Thanks for the comments so far.

Forgot to mention:
- no links point to the "old" url
- can't set up 301 due to "bad" database software