Permanently deleting information from the internet has not been easy. The tables have turned! Google launched a URL removal tool to remove unwanted photos, social profiles and any other confidential information that we dread Mom seeing. This includes cached and indexed pages.
The tool was not designed for every business! If you are not sure exactly sure how the Google URL Removal tool works or if you should use the tool, than leave your website to an organic Googlebot crawl. The tool can be harmful to your website’s SEO if not used properly.
How It Helps
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- Delete links of pages that were completely removed.
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The page must return a proper status code (404, 403, 410), has a noindex robot meta tag or be blocked by the robots.txt.
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- Remove snippets or content that was altered.
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The content must be completely removed from webpage. Include a keyword from content in removal tool.
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- Link is removed quicker than waiting for Google to recrawl.
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Submit your request at Webmaster Tools to quickly remove your URL. The URL can be removed within 24 hours.
Using the tool for non-urgent purposes causes other problems. The Google Removal tool has a specific use to help online presence. Google Webmaster tracks each use of the Google URL Removal tool.
When to Not Use the Google URL Removal Tool
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- To clean up your website’s clutter
- To remove crawl errors from your Google Webmaster tools account
- To “start from scratch” with your site
- To take your site offline after being hacked
- To get the right version of your site indexed
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Matt Cutts, Webmaster for Google, recommends avoiding using the Google URL Removal tool unless absolutely necessary. Cutts claims that the tool is overly used. The best option is to create 404 pages and wait for Googlebot to recrawl/reindex the pages. You can also use robot.txt to block out entire sites or directories. Using 404 and robot,txt informs Googlebots that the pages no longer exist. Google will look and respond to requests from websites that excessively use the URL Removal Tool. Consider removing a directory if you are removing too many individual URLs.
Directions to remove a page
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- Verify that the page is removed from website.
- On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, click Google Index on the left-hand menu.
- Click Remove URLs.
- Click New removal request.
- Type the URL of the page you want removed from search results (not the Google search results URL or cached page URL), and then click Continue. How to find the right URL. The URL is case-sensitive—use exactly the same characters and capitalization that the site uses.
- Click Yes, remove this page.
- Click Submit Request.
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Contact your webmaster to after using the removal tool. A third-party tag may still make your content accessible. The URL Removal tool will remove only from Google index but the page(s) still exist. The page may be found directly through your URL or on other search engines. A webmaster ensures that the page(s) are completely deleted. The URL can be removed in less than 24 hours.
The Google URL Removal tool can help repair business’ websites and social reputations! It is common for large sites to have multiple URLs for duplicated content. You may need to apply multiple requests for the same content. Lauren Starling SEO references the most efficient method to finding duplicated content. Social profiles can be found using domain.com/username query. Her search on Pinterest showed more than 19 URLs altogether.
The Google URL Removal tool helps people remove unwanted online content effectively. The modern tool ensures that internet user’s information will be removed from Google. Google URL Removal tool is a progressive effort to filter content online.