I noindexed my ‘crawled but not indexed’ pages. Did I overreact?
Google’s core updates destroyed me (one of my sites dropped from 1.2M unique visitors per month to ~100K, for example).
They stopped indexing hundreds of my pages.
So I decided to try noindexing the ones they clearly didn’t like (on top of improving content, etc.).
These pages are still indexing fine in Bing, so instead of manually setting “no index” for each one in RankMath, I used a WordPress plugin to bulk upload a CSV of the URLs from Google Search Console.
This added <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> specifically for those pages only (I didn’t touch robots.txt).
My questions are:
Do you think this is the right approach, or was there a better way?
Did I overreact by noindexing these pages? My thought process was that Google might see my site as lower quality if I left hundreds of “crawled but not indexed” pages hanging.