• Registered: 2011-11-16
  • Posts: 85

Topic: Google Remove URL

Hi guys,

I've just processed a remove url request with google. For those who have previously done this request, how long does it typically take to have the pages/directories you requested deindexed?

Cheers

  • Registered: 2011-12-15
  • Posts: 31

Re: Google Remove URL

If you urgently need to remove unwanted content that has gotten indexed by Google and you can't wait for it to naturally disappear, you can use our URL removal tool to expedite the removal of content from our search results as long as it meets certain criteria

Removing a single URL

In general, in order for your removal requests to be successful, the owner of the URL(s) in question—whether that's you, or someone else—must have indicated that it's okay to remove that content. For an individual URL, this can be indicated in any of three ways:

    block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
    block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag
    indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 status code

Before submitting a removal request, you can check whether the URL is correctly blocked:

    robots.txt: You can check whether the URL is correctly disallowed using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.
    noindex meta tag: You can use Fetch as Googlebot to make sure the meta tag appears somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. If you want to check a page you can't verify in Webmaster Tools, you can open the URL in a browser, go to View > Page source, and make sure you see the meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags.
    404 / 410 status code: You can use Fetch as Googlebot, or tools like Live HTTP Headers or web-sniffer.net to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code. Sometimes "deleted" pages may say "404" or "Not found" on the page, but actually return a 200 status code in the page header; so it's good to use a proper header-checking tool to double-check.

If unwanted content has been removed from a page but the page hasn't been blocked in any of the above ways, you will not be able to completely remove that URL from our search results. This is most common when you don't own the site that's hosting that content. We cover what to do in this situation in a subsequent post.

If a URL meets one of the above criteria, you can remove it by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals, entering the URL that you want to remove, and selecting the "Webmaster has already blocked the page" option. Note that you should enter the URL where the content was hosted, not the URL of the Google search where it's appearing.

For example, enter
   http://www.example.com/embarrassing-stuff.html

not
   http://www.google.com/search?q=embarrassing+stuff


If unwanted content has been removed from a page but the page hasn't been blocked in any of the above ways, you will not be able to completely remove that URL from our search results. This is most common when you don't own the site that's hosting that content.


Hope this helps! wink

Last edited by mycha21 (2011-12-18 15:07:00)