Bulk Archive and Google Search Results

[Natkinson]

Last week we did a pretty big archive of a ton of outdated forum content using the new bulk archive tool. Because of the large size (21k pieces of content) there was no way we could do a redirect for each message to relevant content, so we redirected to a main explaining why the content was archived and linking out to general boards for relevant content. 

However, we're now receiving a ton of complaints from people coming in from search engines (mostly Google) expecting to land on the specific forum topic page that Google showed but landing instead on the general page we redirected to. Is there a way to remove those results entirely from Google?

For example, let's say at some point this question (the one you're currently reading) gets archived in the Atlas community. Then I Google "Bulk Archive and Google Search Results". This page would likely appear at the top of the results, but would go to a redirected page here in Atlas. But is there a way either on the community side or Google's side to stop these archived pages from even showing up as search results?

[Drew_C]

I was going to suggest the removals tool in Google Search Console for your community, but I'm looking at it now and see that it doesn't appear to have a way to upload URLs in bulk.

https://search.google.com/u/1/search-console

Digging a little deeper uncovered a Chrome browser extension that might be helpful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webmaster-tools-bulk-url/pmnpibilljafelnghknefahibdnfeece

It's probably worth a shot if you've got all of the removed URLs on-hand.

[Natkinson]

@Drew_C thanks for the reply. We're looking at the tools in Search Console but with 21k things already archived, we don't have a good way to get even a bulk list of everything (unless I'm missing something on our Archives page). And that doesn't seem like a good way to manage this volume of archived content either way, as it would get pretty unwieldy to make sure we have everything. We're hoping for some automated way to have Khoros tell Google these pages are gone or have Google re-crawl and remove them from results.

[AshishKe]

Hi @Natkinson , as part of archiving, the content in the Community is de-indexed from robots.txt and sitemap indices, to enable removal from the indices of general purpose search engines like Google. Also, the handling has been designed in such a way that when a related URL is provided, automatic redirection to the related URL overtime transfers the organic traffic and SEO benefits (PagerRank, keyword rankings etc.) coming from now-archived page directly to the new URL.