Remove a page from the Google Index
Our website is about adding your website to the search engines. But sometimes you wish to remove some pages or information from the search engines. Google supports this with several removal options.
- Change the URL of your website
- Remove your website
- Remove individual pages
- Remove snippets
- Remove cached copies
- Remove outdated pages (dead links)
- Remove images from Google Image Search
Remove your website
If you don't want your website or parts of it in the index of Google, you can add a file in the root of the server, the so called robots.txt
Remove individual pages
If you don't want any robot to add your website to their index, use the robots metatag and add it in the HTML code of your website.
Remove snippits
A snippet is a text excerpt that appears below a page's title in our search results and describes the content of the page. It helps users to see which search results appear in which context of the webpage, before clicking on the result. Users will click on a search result that correspond the best with the text excerpt.
To prevent Google from displaying snippets for your page, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">
Note : Removing snippets also removes cached pages.
Remove cached pages
Google automatically takes a "snapshot" of each page it crawls and archives it. This "cached" version allows a webpage to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page's web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it, and we display a message at the top of the page to indicate that it's a cached version. Users can access the cached version by choosing the "Cached" link on the search results page.
To prevent all search engines from showing a "Cached" link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
To allow other search engines to show a "Cached" link, preventing only Google from displaying one, use the following tag:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
Note : This tag only removes the "Cached" link for the page. Google will continue to index the page and display a snippet.
Note : if you need to make an urgent request for your content to be removed from the Google index and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, you can expedite the process by using the URL removal request tool. Google will try to complete this process in 3-5 business days, though large-scale URL removal requests will take longer. Make sure your webmaster has added the correct meta tags in the HTML of the pages.
Remove an outdated (dead) link or page
Google updates its entire index regularly. When they crawl the web, they automatically find new pages, remove outdated links, and reflect updates to existing pages, keeping the Google index fresh and as up-to-date as possible.
Outdated pages or links usually fall out of Google's index naturally when other pages stop linking to them.
Remove an image from Google Image Search
To remove an image from Google's image index, have your website developer add a robots.txt file to the root of the server that blocks the image.
For example, if you want Google to exclude the dogs.jpg image that appears on your site at www.yoursite.com/images/dogs.jpg, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
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