Site owners usually spend a lot of time creating and posting new content on the site or improving the already published content to perform better in organic search. It’s, therefore, a shame to remove pages from the search index that have taken a lot of time and effort, but sometimes it’s worth doing and is necessary due to product stock, legal reasons, or changes in business direction or messaging.
Deleting content isn’t always a story about permanently deleting a page. There are several levels: you can only remove it from the index, leaving it on the site, then users will not find it in the search results, but will be able to go to it by following links from other pages or from bookmarks. Or you can delete it from the site – permanently or temporarily by sending it to the archive.
Some of the most common methods for removing obsolete content are:
Noindex tag
You can not remove the page from the site, but give the robots a signal not to index it using the noindex tag. If it is already in the index, the next crawl bots should see the tag and remove it from the index.
meta name = "robots" content = "noindex"
The noindex tag can be configured using SEO plugins for CMS, this feature is often found in them.
Users will still be able to visit the page if it has internal links on the site, or if they have visited it before and bookmarked the address.
Removing a page from the index using noindex will not be irreversible. If you want to return the page, remove the tag and the next time it crawls, the search bot will see it.
Please note that if you removed a page with good positions from the index, it is not a fact that if you remove the noindex, it will return to the same SERP.
Tool to remove URLs in Yandex.Webmaster
You can speed up the process of deleting from Yandex. First, you need to disable their indexing: register disallows in the robots.txt file and specifies the robot’s meta tag with the noindex directive on the page. It is necessary. On the next walk, the robot will see these signals.
To speed up the process, the Webmaster has a “Remove URL” tool. To remove individual pages, select By URL and enter the address. You can delete up to 500 addresses of one site per day.
