How to de-index search pages?

[Samsam1978]

Hi guys ohhh I am all confused! all my search pages have been accidently indexed I don't want them indexed obviously. I am getting all confused with my tags. Is putting this in the header enough?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://mysite.com/search/keyword/" />

Or do I also need to put in these?

<link rel="next" href="https://www.mysite.com/?q=keyword/keyword &page=1" />
<link rel="prev" href="https://www.mysite.com/?q=keyword/keyword &page=1" />

Thank you for your help

[lucy24]

At the risk of sounding like That Other Forum, isn't this still the same question as this one [webmasterworld.com]?

[Samsam1978]

No because I read that I need to use this in the search page rather than robots.txt

[Samsam1978]

Thanks though Lucy for your response on the other post, so you think i should just disallow in robots.txt? or use the meta tag?

[phranque]

if you are noindexing the page i don't see a need for those link elements.
the link rel next/prev would be useful if you were indexing a collection of documents.
the link rel canonical would be useful if you wanted "this" document indexed under another url.
if anything, the link rel canonical may send an unwanted signal.

[Samsam1978]

Yes that is what I thought thanks so much :-)

[MayankParmar]

Add this to your robots.txt:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /?s=*
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Allow: /wp-admin/images/

[phranque]

MayankParmar please explain how your post is relevant to Samsam1978's problem.

[MayankParmar]

phranque Sam said that his website's search pages are getting indexed. If Disallow: /?s=* is added to the robots.txt, Google won't able to index the search pages, as it is disallowed :D And once the access is blocked, Google will deindex them (hopefully).

[timemachined]

Yes but you don't disallow if you want pages to drop out of G automatically, you noindex. Only disallow if they're not already in.

If disallowing in robots, then you need to manually / bulk remove the known pages via webmaster tools yourself as if you disallow, G won't know. An answer previously gleamed from here.

[phranque]

MayankParmar:

Disallow: /?s=* won't exclude robots from crawling the search urls used by Samsam1978 and as timemachined stated exclusion from crawling will not deindex the url.

instead the url will show this description in search results:

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt

the other Disallow/Allow directives are irrelevant to the problem statement.