We usually spend so much time in SEO trying to get Google to index a website and serve up our pages that we do not often think that a crucial part of SEO is the removal of pages from the Google Index.
There are a number of different reasons why you may want to remove a page from the Google Index. It could have sensitive information which got there by mistake (and it’s now urgent to remove it), you may no longer want this page to show up, or you could simply want to do some pruning to your website’s content in order to focus on quality pages and remove pages of poor quality which, with the Google Panda update can affect your entire website.
An example which actually happened was when the webmaster of a commercial site discovered that hundreds of test pages with duplicate content and poor quality content which had been set up on a protected directory had somehow got indexed by Google and were now showing up on the search results and were tripping all sorts of spam website triggers.
New webmasters usually panic or scratch their heads at this challenge and many are unsure what to do when the solutions to it are both numerous and easy to implement.
The easiest thing in the world is to delete the page from your website manually. This will force the server to deliver a 404 when there is a call for that page and Google will soon drop it from its index. A 404 return however is not a great thing to have your website do. Too many of these, or even one served a lot of times, signals a site that has content issues which means that (you guessed it!) the Google Panda update filters will start to apply.
So what else can you do?
Plenty. You could, if you followed my Robots.txt piece a few weeks back, simply edit your Robotstxt file to disallow the URLs you want Google not to crawl. Next time your website gets indexed Google will not index the disallowed URLs and they will be dropped from its index.
You could also use Google’s URL removal tool in the Google Webmaster Tools to request that Google removes a URL from its index.
With all these methods at your fingertips there really is no need to panic when you want content to be removed from your website.
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