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Google’s Remove URLs Feature
By Kimberly Bock | January 23, 2008
It seems that there was a time (around 2004) when Google would allow you to remove unwanted or problematic URL’s for 180 days. Leaving ample opportunity for you to change your mind.
But The Search Engine Roundtable released a tidbit of information about Google’s “Remove URL’s Feature” today.
According to Google Webmaster Help page,
“Content removed with this tool will be excluded from the Google index for a minimum of 90 days, regardless of whether the content becomes available to our crawler during that time.”
If that’s not quite what you need, then 
Sebastian has a better option.
“If you want to remove stuff from search indexes permanently, not only Google’s, then you need to serve verified crawlers a forbidden response code (see how to deindex content).”
If you have difficulty understanding code, then this may be barking up a steeper trunk than you care to climb to get the cat down, but it works.
Topics: Search |
January 26th, 2008 at 1:21 am
I have never needed these tools until recently. I had a page that was listing in results that I didn’t want there. I used the google webmaster tool and it was gone in a couple days.
I have a found a couple more reassuarnce messaures using .htaccess mod rewrite forcing redirects by specific bots and also use the robots.txt method. One of the great features is that it is still in your site and not included in SE results. These methods are especially important for contact pages, information you don’t want public (and not password protected), and login gateways. There are many reasons why. Great heads up on the update.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Chris: Yup..
Using robots.txt is something that Google tells you to do before they will remove the URL..
I remember trying to remove a couple when I first started. I had placed my request, but it was denied because I didn’t use use robots.txt first.