If you have been using Tags extensively in your WordPress Blog, you might see hundreds of tags getting indexed by Google which according to some SEO ‘experts’ may cause duplicate content issue. In general I don’t tend to follow any SEO advises and just concentrate on generating Quality content and backlinks. However one of my blogs had thousands of tags in Google Index and while all the posts were not getting indexed. I am not sure what could be reason behind that, However as a preemptive measure I wanted to remove all the tags indexed by Google.
So Here is the Detailed Guide in case you want to clean up your Google Index and remove all the post tags from Google Search Index. Only Proceed with this tutorial if you are sure what you are doing.
1. Google Webmaster Tools
Make sure your blog is listed under Google Webmaster tools and verified.
2. Robots.txt
Enter Below code in your Robots.txt file which should be in root directory of your blog.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/
3. Logon to your Google Webmaster Tools and Click on ‘ Crawler access ‘ and choose ‘ Remove URL’ as displayed in the image below and Click on ‘ New removal request ‘
4. And From the Next Window choose ‘ A Directory and all subdirectories ‘ on your site’ as displayed in the image below.
And after checking the above box click on ‘ Next ‘ and it would ask you to enter the URL of directory which you want to remove. Like http://yourdomain.com/tag/ — you would only need to add ‘tag/’ and then click on Submit Removal Request.
It should remove all the tags which normally appear in Google like http://yourdomain.com/tag/google-video etc. I am not sure If tag cause duplicate content issue or not. I just did to experiment and see if more and more posts get indexed by Google after removal of the tags from their Index. I won’t recommend you to do that unless you are having problems like I did. Additionally If you are using All-in-One SEO plugin you can use noindex meta tag for all of your tags which would block Search Engines to Index them.
Sheelagh, please see in my post above where I quoted what Technocratic support told me “However, if a post has been indexed before and the tags indexed before, then changing the tags, deleting or adding tags to the post, to my knowledge do not get indexed at this time.”