Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:00 AM
Webmaster Level: AllWe recently made a change to the Remove URL tool in Webmaster Tools to eliminate the requirement that the webpage's URL must first be blocked by a site owner before the page can be removed from Google's search results. Because you've already verified ownership of the site, we can eliminate this requirement to make it easier for you, as the site owner, to remove unwanted pages (e.g. pages accidentally made public) from Google's search results.
Removals persist for at least 90 days
When a page’s URL is requested for removal, the request is temporary and persists for at least 90 days. We may continue to crawl the page during the 90-day period but we will not display it in the search results. You can still revoke the removal request at any time during those 90 days. After the 90-day period, the page can reappear in our search results, assuming you haven’t made any other changes that could impact the page’s availability.
Permanent removal
In order to permanently remove a URL, you must ensure that one of the following page blocking methods is implemented for the URL of the page that you want removed:
- indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 HTTP status code
- block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
- block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag
For more information about URL removals, see our “URL removal explained” blog series covering this topic. If you still have questions about this change or about URL removal requests in general, please post in our Webmaster Help Forum.
17 comments:
Thanks Google, making life much easier as always! 10/10
Great improvement!
I have made a chrome plugin this night to make easy the processes to remove urls from webmaster tools http://forumseo.com.br/38-seo-url-removal-chrome-plugin/
This plugin puts a smal X after the title in each SERP result and we have just to click on it to send url directly to webmaster removal panel tool with all fields full filled. So we need just to press ok.
Its a time saver to remove a lot of urls, i can just bulk right click and remove a lot of urls in few seconds with a few clicks.
I hope it helps.
I didn't even knew that this kind of option exists. I'll finally be able to remove links from my old blog engine :)
This is very helpful. I am going to remove on url on my site from google search. Thanks Google to make my life easier.
How about an API that allows us to remove large volumes of 'lower quality content' more efficiently? Since Google already considers them lower quality, it crawls them very slowly, which means that it takes forever to get them out of the index.
Also, it would be nice that removed content was actually removed from the index, not just removed from search results. For those trying to improve Google's perception of our sites, this doesn't really help.
This really only helps for DMCA requests and things of that nature.
I know the answer-- just be patient and let Google remove your content from the index naturally. Well, it's hard to be patient when we've got to put food on the table and shoes on our children's feet. We're being punished for behavior that we have been rewarded for year after year.
Glad to hear it.
It would be nice if we could upload a CSV or XLS or even a TXT file to remove a larger list of URLs at a time. It's really cumbersome to do it one URL at a time, when you have to remove several hundred links from an old website.
My wrists ache after a marathon session like that...
Sorry, so what is new? This is the same which used to be in old URL removal tool. May be I missed something?
Hey Thomas,
If all the URLs you want to remove are in the same directory, you can just do it that way - less work.
It increased the options so that we don't have to chase or request clients several times to change the robot.txt.
cool, A good job. this will help us more.
Be great if there was a way to link the removal tool to the 'not found' and 'soft 404 links' section.. I have now 100s of links appearing there that have never existed or have been totally removed - be great if I could just move all those entries over to the link removal tool and say 'please get rid of them' - I wonder if these dead links will ever be removed from google otherwise?
Decided to clear a lot of my pages down after the Panda algorithm changes - I seem to be just making the site even worse according to the google search
Thank you Google! Nice improvement!
What happened to the Public URL removal tool?
Hi,
I have discovered a bug in this tool and cannot find anyone to report it to or how to get around it. I'm trying to remove a bunch of pages from my site that a hacker created, but these pages do not adhere to the strict standards of URL structure. They contain colons and periods in odd places, and the URL Remove Tool is chocking on them. Can someone please help? I started a discussion in WMT Forums, but to no avail. Thanks.
Thanks google for this. I have near about 13000 pages to remove. It is very time taking to remove all one by one. After reading this thread i did so
websiteurl/directory/
and hopefully it will remove all links in this directory.
Is not it???
I have down all pages and page getting "Not Found 404".
I have removed some pages yesterday and their state changes from pending to removed. but these pages still appearing in search.
My question is how much time required to appear in google search when it is removed by remove link option in webmaster tool.
Regards
qmaan
I have some issue in the google index.
I've renameed the site name and I still see the old site in index results. Actually I see them both.
Old one doesn't appears in webmaster tools, I delete it from there.
How do I rid of the old sites that was renamed now?
Hi,
Please tell me how can I remove the URL of my site in Bulk from Google SERP.
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