Member Avatar for harininet

Hi,

I have a quick question! I have implemeted robots.txt to disallow some of my pages! How long it will take to do this? whether i can get all my pages OUT OF INDEX all at a time or it will happen pages by pages. I'm confused

Ideas are welcome

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Short answer: disallowing URLs in robots.txt does not instantly or universally remove them from search indexes. Robots.txt only tells crawlers which URLs they should not fetch; whether and when a URL disappears from results depends on each crawler's recrawl schedule and how the URL was discovered. was right that crawl frequency matters, and is correct that robots.txt is checked early — but that check controls crawling, not guaranteed de-indexing. For the formal behavior see the protocol spec and Google's guidance: RFC 9309 — The Robots Exclusion Protocol and Google: robots.txt specifications.

Practical options and a safe sequence:

  • For fast, temporary removal from Google, use the Search Console Removals tool (it hides results while you arrange a permanent fix).
  • For permanent removal, either remove the page (so it returns 404/410) or allow crawling and add a noindex directive (meta tag or X‑Robots‑Tag). Important: if you keep the URL blocked by robots.txt, crawlers can’t see noindex, so don’t block a URL you want to de-index via a meta tag.
  • If you must prevent crawling while ensuring removal, delete the resource (or protect it behind auth) so crawlers can’t access content and the URL will eventually be dropped.

Expect removal to happen per-URL as crawlers revisit. High-traffic pages may be removed in days; low-traffic pages can take weeks or longer. Verify progress with server logs and Search Console’s URL Inspection (shows last crawl and indexing status). Final caution: robots.txt is not a security control — sensitive data should be removed or access-restricted, not merely disallowed.

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Member Avatar for stymiee

It depends on your site. Sites that are crawled more frequently will see results faster then sites crawled less frequently. If you want pages removed from the SERPs quickly robots.txt is not your best option. Use a removal request instead.

Member Avatar for nytrokiss

when the seach engine crawls your site the first file it hits is robots.txt and if it sees to disallow any files it won't index them which means they should go off there index!

Member Avatar for webmasterran

when the bot crawls thats the time when it'll see what is allowed and whats not allowed and make sure u use opening slash / and closing slash /

/images/

something like that when not allowing the bot to crawl with the right syntax =)

Member Avatar for Candy_ME

Yes, I agree with webmasterran. I too use robot,txt for my sites to say the search engines not to crawl my page.

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