Print Pages Being Favored Over Html Pages!

[petermoses]

Hi,

My client has thousands of 'print version' pages on his site, and now many of them are appearing in the SERPS instead of the proper web page.

Putting noindex on them all could be quite a task....and may not work anyway.

Is there a better way to resolve this? Can one list that many pages in the robots.txt file?

[dianna]

You might be able to contrive a wildcard option but that probably would not help much. This may only be a temporary situation that lasts a few weeks. Every now and then Google seems to dump a lot of pages from its index and then it recrawls the Web and rebuilds the index. I have seen many, many complaints in numerous forums over the past couple of weeks about sites' pages vanishing from Google. That is usually a clear signal of the temporary situation I describe.

I suppose if you cannot add "noindex" meta tags to all those pages, implementing a "rel='canonical'" tag would be just as cumbersome. But going forward you may want to work with your client on that.

In the meantime, one option some people have found helps is to acquire new trusted (high-value) links to their deeper content.

[Bluesky]

This problem is true,thank you very much !

[Graham]

Thank you for the information.