Bulk de-index/redirect pages - how to?

[riatkstarley]

Hi all,

Anyone who can help with this is a massive legend.

Basically, my company built an ecommerce site recently with product filters based on categories and tags, however we found that pagination was causing a problem. Long story short, we fixed the problem, but I've been left with thousands of URLs that were crawled before we fixed it, and are now 404ing. I was wondering if there was a way to remove these from the index? I've applied URL parameters in Webmaster Tools, but obviously they've still been crawled initially.

An example structure of these naughty URLs:

http://www.example.com/product-tag/nameoftag/page/2/?filter_region=92

Alternatively, can they be addressed by a catch all redirect in .htaccess? I'm not going to lie, I'm a little scared of .htaccess and rarely have much success with it, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Ria

[aakk9999]

URLs returning 404 will eventually be removed from index, but it may take some time.

I think that the best would be for these to return 410 Gone as this will make Google remove them from index sooner.

If there is a pattern (or a few patterns) that exist in all these URLs and do not exist elsewhere, then this should just be a few lines in .htacess

There are many examples of serving 410 Gone in Apache Forum [webmasterworld.com], but you will need to identify the pattern in URL that only exist in URLs you want to remove from index.

[riatkstarley]

Hi aakk9999, thanks for your response.

Is it possible to serve 410 Gone for dynamic URLs? All the ones that need removing contain parameters such as the one above.

Thanks!

Ria

[aakk9999]

Yes it is. If the parameter is unique to these URLs you want to remove, you can filter on this.

I suggest you search [webmasterworld.com] WebmasterWorld for QUERY_STRING and try to do something yourself using many examples provided. If you need more help after trying and getting nowhere, post the question in Apache forum [webmasterworld.com] stating what you have tried.

[riatkstarley]

Will do, thanks so much!