Let me preface this by saying I'm a bit of a noob here. I've built our sites, but I'm not a real developer. OK, so we are fortunate enough to have a good location on google search. We recently discovered an oddity though. If you google our website, it shows a full listing, with sub-pages. Something like this: oursite.net ...Products1............................. - Logo Image ...oursite.net/products.................2011.pro-lite.net ...Products2............................. - Contact Us ...2011.oursite.net/products2......oursite.net/contact As you can see, there are two problems. #1 - unwanted items are getting pushed higher #2 - the 2011.archive site is getting lumped on the result I am thinking that the problem is occurring because we ran that site for a long time, so there may be some ranking history. Then the problem sustains itself because the rankings remain high for pages that should not be listed at all. So my question is first, can I customize this full listing so it shows the right links? My second question is, what else can I do to get the 2011.oursite links off the listing? I need to keep the archive site live for dealer use and internal use, and some of those guys use google to find info on that site... but I don't want those links to show up on our main site's listing. When people are looking for something specific on the 2011 site, I want them to find it. When people are looking for the main site, I don't want them to see anything on 2011. I have a feeling there's something simple, but don't know where to look. Your assistance would be appreciated.
The first thing you need to do is to let Google know which pages you want indexed and which pages you want ignored. The best way to tell Google which pages to index is to use a sitemap.xml file with your current pages. You can find complete instructions in Google Webmaster tools. It looks like your archived pages are all in a subdomain, so you can block that subdomain in the robots.txt file. Next you need to look for any active links on active pages that are still linking to those archived pages, you need to remove any of those links. One thing you can do if you don't have too many pages is to put a nofollow robots meta tag in the head section of each page you want ignored. And finally if all else fails put that subdomain behind a login (password protect the subdomain), that will block the Googlebot from even getting in there to index those pages. That should do it, but it will take a while as Google rechecks your site a few times.
Actually, I had come to the same results after further searching. Your comments are like everything I spent hours reading and researching for all wrapped up in a neat bundle... with a few extra tidbits. Many thanks!