Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 2:38 PM
Webmaster level: AllThere's a lot of content on the Internet these days. At some point, something may turn up online that you would rather not have out there—anything from an inflammatory blog post you regret publishing, to confidential data that accidentally got exposed. In most cases, deleting or restricting access to this content will cause it to naturally drop out of search results after a while. However, 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 (which we'll discuss below).
We've got a series of blog posts lined up for you explaining how to successfully remove various types of content, and common mistakes to avoid. In this first post, I'm going to cover a few basic scenarios: removing a single URL, removing an entire directory or site, and reincluding removed content. I also strongly recommend our previous post on managing what information is available about you online.
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
- 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 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
This article has more details about making sure you're entering the proper URL. Remember that if you don't tell us the exact URL that's troubling you, we won't be able to remove the content you had in mind.
Removing an entire directory or site
In order for a directory or site-wide removal to be successful, the directory or site must be disallowed in the site's robots.txt file. For example, in order to remove the http://www.example.com/secret/ directory, your robots.txt file would need to include:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret/
It isn't enough for the root of the directory to return a 404 status code, because it's possible for a directory to return a 404 but still serve out files underneath it. Using robots.txt to block a directory (or an entire site) ensures that all the URLs under that directory (or site) are blocked as well. You can test whether a directory has been blocked correctly using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.
Only verified owners of a site can request removal of an entire site or directory in Webmaster Tools. To request removal of a directory or site, click on the site in question, then go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL. If you enter the root of your site as the URL you want to remove, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to remove the entire site. If you enter a subdirectory, select the "Remove directory" option from the drop-down menu.
Reincluding content
You can cancel removal requests for any site you own at any time, including those submitted by other people. In order to do so, you must be a verified owner of this site in Webmaster Tools. Once you've verified ownership, you can go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL > Removed URLs (or > Made by others) and click "Cancel" next to any requests you wish to cancel.
Still have questions? Stay tuned for the rest of our series on removing content from Google's search results. If you can't wait, much has already been written about URL removals, and troubleshooting individual cases, in our Help Forum. If you still have questions after reading others' experiences, feel free to ask. Note that, in most cases, it's hard to give relevant advice about a particular removal without knowing the site or URL in question. We recommend sharing your URL by using a URL shortening service so that the URL you're concerned about doesn't get indexed as part of your post; some shortening services will even let you disable the shortcut later on, once your question has been resolved.
Edit: Read the rest of this series:
Part II: Removing & updating cached content
Part III: Removing content you don't own
Part IV: Tracking requests, what not to remove
Companion post: Managing what information is available about you online
64 comments:
Thanks for the step-by-step guide. I had to do this a few weeks ago for a directory that contained old files that I didn't know were there. (The webmaster didn't take them down.) It's important to note that adding the pages to the robots.txt file is absolutely required. I submitted the request before doing this and it was denied. I added the files to the robots.txt file and resubmitted the request, and bingo! Content removed.
Hey, will the guides to follow cover how to stop Google's FeedFetcher fetching a feed? For ages now, some feeds of mine have had no subscribers and been returning 410, but regardless of what I put in the URL removal tools, FeedFetcher seems to keep coming back (not presenting a subscriber count).
@shortcipher No, we haven't planned to talk about FeedFetcher. The URL removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results; it doesn't control whether or not we crawl a particular URL, so I don't believe it would resolve the issue you're describing.
I'll ask around and see what I can find out about blocking FeedFetcher.
Thanks for this article but i didnt find any support from this i have many url which automatically indexed in google but need to indexing for correct page not other unfilled page..
As I have movie section including synopsis page, showtime page, buy page, review page for a movie it should be complete details which i want indexing in google but google indexed the incomplete info page and complete page also..why it does two times of indexing for one movie.
I cant block that page because one movie which has on website but incomplete info is in our database so does the google index the data from our database?
How can i remove this problem please help me out..
Thanks
Very interesting article - thanks! Everyone's always talking about how best to add pages to Google etc - removing them doesn't come up as often.
@Sweetu: You can either block those pages from indexing, or consider using one of these methods to tell search engines which is the "preferred" version.
Matt Cutts at his recent interview from Eric Enge referring using robots.txt to block crawling of KML files said:
"Typically, I wouldn't recommend that. The best advice coming from the crawler and indexing team right now is to let Google crawl the pages on a site that you care about, and we will try to de-duplicate them. You can try to fix that in advance with good site architecture or 301s, but if you are trying to block something out from robots.txt, often times we'll still see that URL and keep a reference to it in our index. So it doesn't necessarily save your crawl budget".
Do you also see the contradiction, or am I missing something?
Thanks for the wonderful information.
We have a website www.capertravelindia.com. 4 years back, someone filed a DMCA complaint against my site to Google for content copied on 35 pages.
As a result Google just blocked those pages from its search result.
We checked the pages and found a fair amount of matching text on those pages.
Ultimately, we removed all those pages and content also and requested Google for "Reconsideration". But nothing was done...we are getting blocked pages messages every month.
In addition to that, when we created few subdomains of the main domain....the number of blocked pages just got multiplied by the number of subdomains, even if the blocked URL were non-existent.
We have tried for Reconsideration, removal and robot.txt also but are unable to get rid of this blocked pages message.
Could you please help me.....what should we do and do these blocked content harm our website?
Dear Susan,
Your article is really help me out and finally i can solve my problem.
A few days ago i deleted one of my url using G removal tool and trying to reindex it again but i always failed...i got panic because that url participate in SEO contest...after reading your article i managed to cancel it from G webmaster tools, sorry for my bad english thanks moriska.
I have been remove one of my blog URL, but it still show up on search result, why???
@Webnauts: Are you referring to the "[blocking URLs with robots.txt] doesn't necessarily save your crawl budget" part? If so, here's a simple way to think about it: Google determines how much to crawl a site based on both the amount of data and the number of URLs it crawls from that site. URLs blocked by robots.txt won't affect the former, but may affect the latter (since disallowed URLs may still be scheduled for re-crawling to check whether the robots.txt restriction is still in place).
@Manish: If Google removed your pages from search results because of a DMCA complaint, then you would need to respond to that DMCA complaint in order to get them reinstated. The URL removal tool and/or reconsideration requests will not help you with DMCA-related removals.
Will a removal request take the page/directory out of search results only or out of search results and out of the index?
Thanks for the advice Susan. To paraphrase, it sounds like to block all indexing and caching of my site, the best way is to use the tag
meta name="robots" content="noindex" in the Head section of every page.
If instead I disallowed crawling with a central robots.txt file, but part of the site winds up being linked on someone else's site, my pages could still show up in Google. So this would not work so good. And using both robots.txt and content=noindex is pointless, since Google won't see the no-index instruction on a site which it is not crawling.
Does that sound correct? Any other suggestions to prevent my site from being indexed? And - thanks again!
@DougR: Correct!
For several old URLs, I have used a 301 redirect (for users) AND a Disallow (for the purposes of a URL Removal, because it would not return a 404).
Now that the page is out of the index, if I remove the Disallow (to streamline the robots.txt) and leave the Redirect (in case there are old bookmarks out there), will G reinclude the old URL?
(Presumable the 301 will now prevent it from reincluding in the index, but you say the old link is still in the index and that it will check for the Disallow).
@Susan - thanks for confirming my comment - I really appreciate it!
Doug
Is there any recourse for this situation: a very old site, on an ISP bought up by Earthlink, still appears in searches for our nonprofit. We thought that when we ceased being Earthlink customers the site would of course be taken down. Once we found out otherwise we contacted Earthlink repeatedly but they seem unable to find the site and delete it.
Can we get that old url taken out of results?
All information was removed from "cache" -- except the pdf files -- How do I remove them from "cache"?
Hey shortcipher,
So here's the word from FeedFetcher: Feedfetcher requests come from explicit action by human users (such as viewing a feed they've subscribed to in Google Reader or iGoogle), and not from automated crawlers, so Feedfetcher doesn't follow robots.txt guidelines. AFAICT the way to block it is by user-agent ("Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)") when it attempts to access your feed.
@Robert: It's hard to say whether the URLs would briefly appear or not once you un-Disallowed them; but in general the best (and fastest) way to get search engines to pick up on the fact that a URL has been redirected (and thus to drop it from their results) is to let them crawl it so that they can see and follow the 301.
@Cynthia: As long as the site is still live, Google won't remove it from our results. You'll need to figure out a way to work with Earthlink. Sorry we can't help you with that.
@aarennels: We cover that in part II of our removals series (under "Removing non-HTML content").
what can i do to request removal from my blog hosted by blogger ?
it is out of order that I should be spending time trying to remove an xxx image related to my name (even if I am not the only one with that name} when it shouldn't be there in the firs place!! I have contacted the police already, then it was gone, and now back again!! just type twitter juan janes and see for yourself!! the police will continue the investigation and contact you asap!!
How long does it take for the removal tool to take in effect? I removed a url and it is still pending?
@Zoiks!: Most removals take ~3-5 days. Removals of an entire site may take a bit longer, but it's around that order of magnitude.
These instructions are great ... if your web host is cooperative. A friend of mine owns a local company and set up one of those freebie web sites a few years back. Now they have their own web domain hosted elsewhere but the old web host refuses to take the old site down. So Google keeps returning all those old, out-of-date pages in search results. Under current Google rules, there is no way to stop this.
Ms. Moskwa:
In 1993, long before Google ever existed, I started operating a tiny, one-person business under my own name. A few years later, still before Google existed, like thousands of other businesses in my geographic area, I was offered a free, print-version yellow pages listing--name, number, and address. At some point, presumably in the mid-to-late 1990s, and without my active authorization, the information from the printed yellow pages listing was carried over to the internet. I shut down my small business in 2004 and have tried to move on to other things in my life. However, now, in 2010, more than 6 years after I closed my business, my name (including the crucial, identifying middle initial), old phone number, and old address, continue to be propagated on multiple "online business directory" sites. These listings, especially since they show up on Google searches of my name, are causing problems as I try to put the old business behind me. (For the record: the business was very low-end computer consulting.) I have contacted as many of these sites as I can (some are set up using privacy or proxy methods that make contacting anyone connected with the site virtually impossible) and requested removal of the problem-causing listings. In some, though by no means all, cases, websites have complied with my request. However, in spite of repeated attempts to use Google's removals tool to get Google to stop returning at least these sites that have removed the problematic information, the tool most often responds with the automated message, "As you may know, information in our search results is actually located on publicly available webpages. Even if we removed this page from our index, the content in question would still be available on the web. [etc.]" However, this message is not accurate; in fact, "the content in question" no longer appears at the provided URLs. These listings, which are an unanticipated consequence (and, I would argue, also were an unanticipatable consequence) of operating under my own name a long time ago, are causing me difficulty in my present life. Why won't Google remove at least those listings where the problem content *really* does not show up at the designated URL?
Ms. Moskwa, I am just one little human being among the billions on the planet. Google is one of the wealthiest and more powerful organizations in human history. Is there someone at Google who might be willing to respond to my concerns and grant my request? Unlike, e.g., the government of China, I am not asking Google to censor information; I am asking Google to remove listings showing my full name and other personal information that reference URLs that do not, in fact, show that information. "Google: Don't be evil." Can you please help? (I thank you in advance for any assistance you can provide.)
@a2boston:
Please see our post on removing pages whose information has changed. If these URLs still exist but your name has been removed, you can request that we remove the cached version of these pages. If you want the URLs completely gone, you'll need to ask the site owners to completely delete or block them. More details are in the post I linked to.
Ms. Moskwa:
I want to begin by thanking you for at least taking the time to provide a brief response to my previous posting.
However, I have specifically attempted to use the method you refer to in your response (using Google's public URL removal tool to request removal of content that has been removed from someone else's webpage). In some cases, as indicated in my previous posting, the automated--but inaccurate--response is "As you may know, information in our search results is actually located on publicly available webpages. Even if we removed this page from our index, the content in question would still be available on the web. [etc.]" In other cases, the "status" for a given URL indicates "Removed," but even 10 or more days after this status is indicated, the vast majority, if not all, of these URLs still show up on a Google search. I recognize that you say, on one of your blog pages, that it can take a while for these listings to disappear from cache; could you be a bit more specific about the time involved? Is it, in fact, routinely more than 10 days? Is it routinely two weeks? A month? Three months? (I do understand that this question will seem quite naive to someone in your position, but I hope you can overlook my ignorance on this point.)
Again, I thank you for your willingness to both post and respond to at least my previous comment, and I do hope you will post and reply to this comment, as well.
Ms. Moskwa:
Apologies for commenting twice in a row, but it occurs to me that my posting of a few moments ago may have been based on a misunderstanding of your brief response to my original comment. When you say, "If these URLs still exist but your name has been removed [which is indeed the case!], you can request that we remove the cached version of these pages," do you mean there is a way to request removal of the cached versions *apart from* using the removal tool? If so, could you elaborate on the process for making this sort of removal request?
Again, my thanks for your willingness to respond to my question.
Thanks that is really useful. I didn't realise what the robots.txt test feature was for until I read your explanation. The fetch as Googlebot is very useful too.
Ms. Moskwa:
I am now using this comment tool not in order to post a public comment, but rather in order to contact you as an employee of Google; in other words, in the absence of any readily-obtainable contact information (such as e-mail address) for you or any other Google employee in a knowledgeable position, I am using this comment tool to send you a de facto e-mail. The issue remains the same as in the most recent two of my three previous comments (which you--or whoever makes these decisions--have been willing to post but not reply to): even after several weeks, Google's removal tool continues to fail to remove inappropriate webpages from searches on my name. The webpages at issue stopped including my name and other personal information weeks ago, or else the URLs have ceased to exist altogether. As I stated in a previous comment, in multiple instances, the tool indicates that the page has been removed from Google listings, but the page continues to appear. In multiple other instances, the tool indicates "As you may know, information in our search results is actually located on publicly available webpages. Even if we removed this page from our index, the content in question would still be available on the web. [etc.]"--yet the webpages involved either no longer exist or do not contain my name. I notice from other Google blog postings on this topic that “removed” listings should no longer appear after no more than a few days. (This, by the way, appears to answer an otherwise unanswered question in my second posting.)
Ms. Moskwa, as I stated in my original posting, I am just one individual person trying to remove my own name from inappropriate and inaccurate listings that appear on Google searches. As I also previously stated, Google is one of the wealthiest and most powerful organizations in human history. At the risk of making an obvious allusion, I am beginning to feel a bit like Josef K. in *The Trial*. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial)
At least in comparison to the general populace of the United States, I do not believe I am incompetent when it comes to computers and the internet. I believe I am using the removal tool correctly (it would seem to be some proof of this that the tool does, in myriad cases, indicate “Removed” with an available “Reinclude” button). At the same time, I do acknowledge that I may be overlooking something.
At this time, I am inviting you, or some other appropriate employee at Google, to contact me via e-mail to try to resolve this situation. You may use the e-mail address associated with this comment. I do sincerely hope to hear from you. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Hi
I am creating a new website for a school, who has a site already listed but it was built by a parent who is no longer around so we are unable to contact the person. We would like that old outdated site removed and our new one to stand alone, is it possible for our old site to be removed? we have no access to it and no contactable person??
Please help.
Kind regards
Loretta
Ms. Moskwa:
I have been having a problem of getting inappropriate details removed from the Google Search results even though they have been removed from the concerned website. I have tried using the Webmaster Removal Request. I am now having to resort to using this comment tool not in order to post a public comment, but rather in order to contact you as an employee of Google. I would have hoped to have your email or someone's email at Google so my problem can be sorted promptly.
My problem is that even after several weeks, Google's removal tool continues to fail to remove inappropriate webpages from searches on my name. The webpages at issue stopped including my name almost 2 months ago, but Google continues to show my name in the search results. Google promises that search results are due to information contained on 3rd party websites but in my case the 3rd party has renmoved my name yet I continue to get bad publicity due to Google. I therefore request you as a Google employee (or whoever at Google is responsible) to immediately remove the references to my name that I have been trying to delete using Webmaster Removal Request.
In some instances, the Webmaster Removal Request tool indicates that the page has been removed from Google listings, but the page continues to appear. In multiple other instances, the tool indicates "As you may know, information in our search results is actually located on publicly available webpages. Even if we removed this page from our index, the content in question would still be available on the web. [etc.]"--yet the webpages involved either no longer exist or do not contain my name.
In some instances the tool says removal has been denied - yet this does not make sense to me as I have double checked that my name has been removed from the website concerned.
Ms. Moskwa, I am just trying to remove my own name from inappropriate and inaccurate listings that appear on Google searches.
I am certain that I am using the removal tool correctly (it would seem to be some proof of this that the tool does, in myriad cases, indicate “Removed” with an available “Reinclude” button).
Please Ms. Moskwa can you contact me via e-mail to try to resolve this situation. You may use the e-mail address associated with this comment. Alternatively, can you get the appropriate person at Google to email me so we can resolve this matter.
Thank you - and I hope you can assist me as I am tired of trying to reslove this matter. Dealing with Google has been very difficult and stressful because there is no helpline telephone to call for human assistance and also there is no google email address to write to with such problems.
I look forward to hearing from you soon Ms Moskwa.
Have a good day.
I canceled my webhosting and took down my URL and changed it. How do I delete my old url since I no longer have access to it. It gives an error page, so I submitted the site to google with a not, but its still indexed. Causing my new URL to get filtered since it has same content as the first URL.
I submitted my blog months ego, registered with adsence,but not been crawled and index. I need update of my blog. My blog (www.naijaobweb.blogspot.com)
Thank you
Richard
I want to know when my blog will be crawled.
Thank you
Richard
I'm still not getting the actual solution. Even I deleted the deadlink,thumbnail still showing the deleted post. Why??
Anybody can help me??
http://mostvisitedbloginasia.blogspot.com/
@a2boston: If you requested removal of an entire URL, then "Removed" means that that entire URL no longer appears in our search results. If you requested removal of the cached copy of a URL, "Removed" means that the cached copy has been removed and will no longer appear in search results; but the URL itself may still appear. Look at the "Removal type" column to see what type of removal you requested. Based on what you're saying, it would've been a cache removal, so it's normal that the URL would still appear in search results.
I believe this section from the post I referred to applies to your situation:
"Google indexes and ranks items based not only on the content of a page, but also on other external factors, such as the inbound links to the URL. Because of this, it's possible for a URL to continue to appear in search results for content that no longer exists on the page, even after the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed. While the URL removal tool can remove the snippet and the cached page from a search result, it will not change or remove the title of the search result, change the URL that is shown, or prevent the page from being shown for searches based on any current or previous content. If this is important to you, you should make sure that the URL fulfills the requirements for a complete removal from our search results."
@Loretta: Google can't do this for you; you'd need to get in touch with whoever's hosting the old site.
This question is a little different, but related to the same topic.
I had a website about my work someone made for me. I decided to build a new one for myself, same topic. I bought a new domain name for it. When the new site was ready, I deleted the old website, and put up the new one. I didn't realize at the time I was giving up my good ranking on Google for the old domain name, which was really stupid.
This was in April. The old URLs are still cached on Google, and from this thread, it sounds like they will be there forever.
Is this true, and if I link/forward them to the same pages on my new site, will they retain the same ranking they had before?
The original pages are no longer on my host server, but I heard of an".htaccess" file that I could put there to direct those cached file names to the new site. Or maybe I could put new pages there with the same address as the cached URLs, if that makes sense, and then redirect them.
I would like to recapture the old ranking I had and direct it my new site, if it's still possible.
Is this a good idea, and is this the way to do it?
Please let me know.
thank you!
@Josh: You should 301 redirect each old page to the equivalent new page on your new site.
@Andrew:
Please read this post to understand why we do not answer questions 1:1 via email.
It sounds like you're requesting cache removals; if your name has been removed from these pages but the pages still exist online, exactly what you're describing would happen. You can verify this by looking at the "Removal type" column in your account; I'm guessing it says "Cache removal"? Please see our second post in this URL removal series for details; in particular:
"Google indexes and ranks items based not only on the content of a page, but also on other external factors, such as the inbound links to the URL. Because of this, it's possible for a URL to continue to appear in search results for content that no longer exists on the page, even after the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed. While a cache removal request can remove the snippet and the cached page from a search result, it will not change or remove the title of the search result, change the URL that is shown, or prevent the page from being shown for searches based on any current or previous content. If this is important to you, you should make sure that the URL fulfills the requirements for a complete removal from our search results."
Hi first of all i dont really speak english, i speak spanish as my natural language just in case theres a problem to understand what i say.
My problem is that im registrated in a web www.todoexpertos.com wich is about asking question to some "expert". The questions i asked were private content because it reveals my real name. So theres and option to put the question and the answers into a "private" mood so it wont get public to anyone. I listed my question to private, but when i write my name in google the questions appeard open to public. This is almost traumatic for me, so I wrote several times to the webmaster trying to contact the privacy staff with no luck. I wish google people could do something about since is really private information with personal value to me.
We changed the technology from asp to aspx, also the url structure. For some of them we made redirections, for others we just let them 404 (a custom error page).
After 3 months, we have thousands of 404 pages reported by Google, even they don't have links anymore to them.
Also even if we use robots.txt to block them,(tested for some of them) their are still reported in Google Webmaster Tools.
Trying to remove them manual, with url removal tool is almost impossible because they are couple of thousands, and we can't use the folder option because the urls are created dynamically and are very different.
Exist a tool , api for google webmaster tools that can permit url removal in bulk. Can we use regular expressions ?
I'm concerned that someone might be preventing my pages from showing up in Google. I am a real estate agent. I will hire someone to help me. I'm not tech savvy and would like to figure this out.
Thanks!
I have used the removal tool to dispose of a URL ....trackback/ about 7 days ago. It says it has been removed in the removal tool report but it has not yet been removed from my list of crawl errors 404.
How long does it usually take?
Please any comments would be welcome.
@English: The URL removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. If that URL continues to 404 it will eventually drop out of your crawl errors report, but there's no way to force it out.
We recrawl URLs that 404 for awhile to make sure that the 404 wasn't just a temporary error. As long as we recrawl it (and it continues to 404) it will continue to appear in your account as a URL that 404s.
Is there any way to purge pages in bulk if they're not in a directory, and therefore addressable via the directory removal function? This problem is causing me MAJOR headaches in trying to deal with the recent Panda update. Let me explain...
We had a bunch of URLs on our site that followed the form:
http://www.example.com/duplicate?dup_id=0000000048zfkf&l
They served a totally legitimate purpose, but were 'low quality/thin', almost by definition. At any given time, there were several million of these pages live, each associated with a different dup_id. We actually restricted them via robots.txt back in mid-November, but targeted querying indicates there are still millions of pages (mostly 404s) still floating around.
The pages are not linked anywhere (because they're 404'd), so Google isn't likely to crawl them often. So, even though as of today we're serving a noindexed page against all requests for /duplicate pages (including those that would have otherwise 404'd), we may have to wait months for them to be crawled and dropped. That timeframe is extremely painful given the Panda penalty that, after very extensive house cleaning/investigation, we're nearly certain these pages are causing.
Anything we can do to manually remove these pages sooner? Would it be legitimate use of a reconsideration request to explain the situation and ask that the URLs be purged, since as far as we can tell, there's no principled way to do it in a reasonable time frame?
I appreciate your input!
My account was hacked and I need Google to deactivate it. My request via the forms-with details of my best memory was sent and kicked back for many times. I can't get any help from Google and someone is using my identity via my gmail address for money scams. How can I get this request to someone in Google?
I have had a wordpress blog deleted now and I no longer have access to it but the cache still comes up when you search my name on Google.
I have been denied by the Google Removal Tool for the reason robots.txt and meta are set up inappropriate. I can do nothing because this blog does not exists already and instead 404 error I get the message: this blog no longer exits.
What can I do?
I’m trying to unsub from this thread, but clicking the unsub link on the latest email brings me to the log in page, fine, and then after that to a page to sign up for Blogger.
More than 240 out of 800 products in a specific directory expired and we want to remove those urls in bulk from google search results. Is it possible to do that using Google API?
Unless the removal is urgent, you don't need to use this tool to request removal -- those URLs will drop out naturally if they return a 404 or 410.
If you need to urgently remove those results, our tool allows you to either remove the entire directory, or remove the URLs one by one.
There's a web page from a local newspaper dated 2004 that keeps popping up at the top of Google searches. How can we get this out of Google's database? We've posted add'l websites, tons of articles, a FB page, Twitter account, etc. It just won't go away.
I Tweeted the question to Matt Cutts and he did not answer my question. Thank you.
Hello Support TM,
I have more then 12000 site to block and wondering if there is any sitemap system to submit, so that every time when I add some SPAM site to my blocked-sitemap it will auto block them. Sending request of 12K URL using current webmaster tool is almost impossible.
I have already blocked them from my database, problem is they are still in search engine, reason I am getting low ranking.
If you could guide me to submit blocked site's sitemap either using webmaster tool or any other way, I would be very glad. I hope you got it what I mean.
is the correct syntax to enter for directory removal:
http://www.example.com/somedirectory
or
http://www.example.com/somedirectory/
I have move my site from a directory to root. I have a disallow for the old directory in robots.txt. I submitted the removal request with the first syntax type which was accepted in the removal section in crawler access over a week ago but it looks like google is still trying to crawl content in that directory.
hi I want all the urls/ my name to be removed from the search result when anybody types my name! pls help it is very very imp. pls do it for me (I will mention my real name if'd ready to help me plsssss)
ill a removal request take the page/directory out of search results only or out of search results and out of the index?www.getblackberry.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=http://www.getblackberry.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3421210&t=34208and
i was working in a private firm and they had my personal details posted under their firm name and put it up on net....luckily i hav asked them to remove the contents and they have done so but on searching my name on google the particular url appears with my name and part of my personalinfo shown but on opening the page everything is removed if u know what i mean...i would like it remove it completely such that even on google search my name or this information doesnt appear.....kindly help cos my new job is at sake due to this.........
hi all,
can anyone help? i've had several url's waiting for removal in pending on googles removal site. it usually only takes a day or 2 to do this but mine have been waiting now for a week...horribly urgent, any thoughts anyone??
Please help, I have a floating image that is appearing on top of one of my blog posts. I don't know how it got there and I can't seem to remove it. Does anyone know how I can remove this image?
Hi, you mentioned remove url link in configuration crawler etc. but there is no such thing. also there is another Remove URL in Optimization. but there is no such thing too which could cancel the site.
I delete my website url goo.gl/nYNJx
now i am trying to add back this url, but of no success. I resubmitted the sitemaps etc. but my site doesn't come in search results.
Please can you fix that. Bing and Yahoo are working fine, because i haven't removed my url from there. And please do let me know how it would be fixed and how much time it would take.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
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The Webmaster Central Team
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