Search engine robots provide excellent performance in terms of indexing the pages and content of the site, but sometimes they may index pages that you do not want to appear in the search results, such as thank-you pages that appear to buyers after completing the payment process, or a page that does not contain content that is useful to the visitor, or for reasons Another security related to the leakage of your business information and data. In this case, it is not appropriate to deindex the entire site from the search results , but rather you need to deindex these specific pages.
Therefore, during this article we will learn how to de-index a specific page from search results.
Ways to de-index a specific page from search results
The presence of many pages that do not provide useful content to the user will affect trust between you and the user, and in addition to that, it will delay the indexing of important pages. The best decision in this case is to remove pages from search results, and there are many methods that enable you to do that, and here are them in detail:
1. Delete the page
The quickest way to remove a page from search engine results is to immediately delete the page itself from within your site’s control panel, by going to the WordPress control panel, and clicking on < Pages > All Pages . Then select the page you want with the mouse cursor and press the Trash option . The page will be removed immediately.
As for articles, click: Articles > All Articles > Trash
After that, when accessing the page through search engines, there will be no visible content to users and they will find a message informing them that this page does not exist or a “404” error will appear. Over time, the page or article will be removed from the search engine.
2. De-index a specific page by adding the noindex code
If you do not want to remove the page content, but only de-index it from search engines, then this method and the following methods are suitable for you. As we know, the file related to determining the content to be indexed is the robots.txt file, and by adding noindex instructions to this file on the page in question, it will be prevented from appearing in search engines.
To get started, you will need to copy the following code:
Then go to the WordPress editor, open the page in question and click on the “+” icon to add a custom HTML component.
Then, copy the previous code and paste it into the html field. Click Update above.
After that, the page will be de-indexed from search results after it is re-crawled.
3- Specify a password for the page in question
It is possible to lock the page by using a password, so that users cannot access the page except by entering the password, and thus the search engine will not access it.
WordPress allows this in simple and easy steps, by opening the page or article on which you want to add the password.
Then click on the Settings icon at the top, then select the General option.
After that, you will see the Visibility Status options, and under Password Protected option enter your password and click Update at the top.
4- Use add-ons to prevent the page from being indexed in search results
It is worth noting that SEO plugins come with an option that enables you to cancel the indexing of a specific page from the search results. You will find this option below in the plugin settings when writing an article or page content. In our explanation of this method, we will use the Yoast SEO plugin and the RankMath plugin because they are among the most widely used SEO plugins. If one uses one, he must abandon the other. Here is the explanation:
Prevent indexing by Yoast SEO
You have to open the page or article that you want to index, and then scroll down until you reach the Yoast SEO plugin settings. Click on the Advanced Settings section and select “ No ” under the Allow search engines to show a page in search results option?
De-indexing using RankMath
If you are using the RankMath plugin, you can also prevent the page from being indexed, by clicking on the RankMath icon located on the top left of the screen, then clicking on the Advanced option and selecting the No Index option.
5- My supervisor’s tools
If you want to de-index a specific page from Google search results, you have another option that can be used, which is the Google Search Console tool .
It is a tool that works to add your site’s content to the Google search engine, in addition to tracking it and providing you with important information about clicks, impressions, and indexing problems. It also enables you to remove content directly from Google, by: Going to the Google Webmaster Tool.
Scroll down and on the right menu you will find the Removals option. Click on it, and then select (New Request ) to submit a request to remove the page from the Google search engine.
Next, enter the link to the page or article in the space provided, select the option to remove this url only. Click Next below.
After confirming the link, click Send Request.
Thus, you have submitted a request to remove the link from the Google search engine. It is worth noting that the page will be indexed again after 6 months. Which means that the page must be de-indexed after this period has passed. Using the same previous steps, it is possible to de-index the page from Bing webmasters. Here it will be re-indexed after 3 months.
How to ensure that the page has been removed from search results
After taking the necessary steps to de-index a specific page from search results, it is important to ensure that the steps were completed successfully and the goal of removing the page from search engines was achieved, through more than one method as follows:
Search in Google search engine
You can search for the page on the search engine, by entering the following phrase:
site:www.example.com/test-page.html
Where the word site is fixed without change, and www.example.com/test-page.html is the link to the page.
Use the webmaster tool
As we know that every search engine has a webmaster tool, which organizes the indexing process and links the site to the search engine, and contains important information that benefits site owners, including verifying the indexed content, by going to the tool and adding the page link in the upper search field, and click On the search icon on the right side.
The result will show you whether the page appears in the search engine or not.
Use the Bing Webmaster Tool
Bing also provides you with a tool that allows you to check whether a page appears in its search results or not. By clicking on the Inspect URL option on the left menu.
Add the page link in the designated field above, and then each result will show whether the page is indexed or not.
Thus, through the previous lines, we have learned about the method of de-indexing a specific page from the search results, through a group of methods that differ according to the degree of security. For example, by adding a password to the page, users and streaming engines will not be able to access it, and this The opposite of what happens when the page is de-indexed using add-ons.
