Pawel Szulencki Search Engine Optimization/Marketing blog.
How to delete website from Google search results
15Jun2008 Filed under: Google Author: Pawel Szulencki
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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If you want to delete your website from Google indexes you have couple of options to chose from:
Option #1: Robots.txt
Create a Robots.txt file with the following code
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
and place it in your root folder on your server. The Robots.txt file will disable all spiders, including Google, from crawling your site and they will not index it at all.
If your website is already in indexes of Google search engine it will take anything between an hour to couple of weeks for changes to appear depending on your luck. Google spider, a Googlebot has to visit your website, read Robots.txt commands and put your website to the queue of websites to delete. As you may understand, it may take a while.
Option #2: Google webmasters tools.
- Open an account with Google webmaster tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- Login to your account.
- If you just created a new account add your website address to your webmaster tools and click “Add site”.
- When you already have a website added click on it, go to Tools/Remove URLs and click on “New removal request”.
- Follow the steps on next screens. At this point you may choose if you want to delete individual URL’s, full directory or subdirectories, entire site or cached copy of Google search results. Depending on option chosen you will have to give certain details to delete desired content.
- When finished click “Submit removal request”. Check after some time to see the results. Generally it should be faster than with use of Robots.txt file
Option #3: Delete your website/web page from your server.
If Google visits your website but cant find a page it will delete it from its indexes. The same if you delete your website from your server, the next time Google visits your site it will not see anything and it will delete it from its indexes.
Why would Google keep in its indexes sites that don’t exist anymore? If it did, their databases would have to be much bigger than they are now, and as you may imagine they are already gigantic. you will also have to wait some time for changes to take affect as Google spider need to visit your site first to delete it.
The combination of Google webmaster tools and Robots.txt file works the best and in my opinion the fastest. After all Google webmaster tools are made to help webmasters to deal also with that kind of things.
Sphere: Related Content- Tags: Google, Google webmaster tools
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Pawel Szulencki is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Marketing certified specialist who is interested in organic SEO, paid campaigns (PPC) and Social Media Marketing channels. (Read more)
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zeeshan (1 comments.)
August 9th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
sir most respectfully . i recently upload website .but when i upload first time some pages problem . so i delete all web page . and again upload web with new pages in google the problem is that when i enter url in google search the google show old web page http://www.insprie.com/man cloths .but i need http://www.insprie.com tell me what i do …..
Pawel Szulencki (18 comments.)
August 9th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
@zeeshan What i understand is that you want to delete your old web page from Google search results by deleting the files from your server. When you do that be aware that Google spiders may not visit your website immediately so Google may not know that you have deleted your files from the server, especially if you uploaded them right away after deleting them.
What i suggest is to delete the pages for longer period of time to give Google time to index your site again and to exclude the removed pages from its indexes. You should also consider inserting robots.txt file or noindex meta tags on the pages you wish to exclude from search engines. You can also use Google webmaster tools and use the exclusion form to exclude that particular web age from Google search results.
In any case you should wait for results.
rb
August 18th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I posted a blog, and on one page used five people’s names. Now whenever you search any of the people in this family under google, my blog comes up. When I realized that I had posted this material publically, in a state of pain, I deleted my entire blog. Then I tried to verify my site, which was a blog through google- blogspot.com–but could not. Without it being verified, I could not use the “remove url request” tool for my own website. At the end of the night, devastated, I just deleted the entire account. All of these mistakes have amounted to the fact that the cached link is still available under google search results, even though I deleted the original page. There will be pressing legal matters this evening, if I do not figure out how to remove this cached material. HOW DO I DO THIS, now that I have no control over my old blog or web account at google? Help pplease!
Pawel Szulencki (18 comments.)
August 18th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
@rb
Now that you have deleted your account and have no control over it the situation is a bit complicated. But there is a solution to everything.
You can log in to your Google account and go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals page where you can request a removal of a site that is not yours (since you deleted your blogspot account you are not the owner of that site anymore). The site should now return a 404 (file not found) response and is suitable to be requested for removal from Google indexes.
It may take some time and there is no way to delete your old blog from Google search results in 5 minutes, but it should take considerably less time if you make an inquiry through that form.
You may read more about that tool at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/requesting-removal- of-content-from-our.html under “Requesting removal of content you don’t own” section on the bottom of the page.
And for the future keep in mind that you may use meta tag to prevent all search engines from showing a “Cached” link for your site.
It is also much better if you have control over the content you wish to remove as you have more options to chose from then. In your situation thats the solution that comes to my mind.
Hope that helps.
If you need more assistance please let me know.
rb
August 18th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
I have done this; it is a pending process. I added to this request format already the entirety of the blog, and tried to add the cache URL, but this is not permitted. I added the exact link of the URL that is no longer available to the request removal site. I hope this works; the problem is the stupid cached link!
Thank you for such a timely response. I wish I hadn’t gotten my hands stuck in this online mess, but it has definitely taught me to protect myself and what I write online. So, yes lesson learned. In the mean time–
know of any way to get web-crawlers to the old site, to realize that information is no longer up to date, and make them note this. How long does the web-crawling process take usually; I cannot let this cached link sit on the web for longer than this week.
If you have any answers to this, let me know. If not, thank you so much for your help already.
Pawel Szulencki (18 comments.)
August 18th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
@rb
Thats good.
To get web-crawlers to visit your site you need to request for URl submission. That way search engines will visit your site and see it doesnt exist (404 File not found) and delete it from its indexes. Here are add URl request forms for major search engines:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo!: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
MSN: http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
You may also use one of the free submission tools available on the Internet, for example http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html Just enter your URl and e-mail address and it will automatically submit your URL to many search engines at once. They will visit your site and exclude it from its indexes.
How log does it takes? Hard to say. It may be 1 hour, it may be 1 week. I cant promise anything, i dont work for Google
Deleting the website from Google indexes will also remove its cached version, so if they delete your site according to your inquiry that should mean also deleting your cached version.
From Google help center:”…you can use the webpage removal request tool to ask us to expedite the removal of the old webpage content (also known as ‘cached copy’)…” meaning that removal of a page equal removal of its cached version - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=508&topi c=13511
rb
August 18th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
and all is in google’s hands! Thank you. I have done everything you suggested– it is wonderful to know that there are still people (I’m preying your not a web robot) that can help sort out the mistakes made on the world wide web. I had read that it could take from a day to three years to remove cached material; but I think I have made it very clear to Google the urgency of this request. Best of luck with the internet (I’m projecting).
Thanks again!
Pawel Szulencki (18 comments.)
August 18th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
@rb
No problem and dont worry, the last time i checked i was a human, not a robot
Let me know how did it go and how fast did you managed to remove the cached version of your blog from Google.
All the best,
Pawel