Tuesday, May 17, 2011
We 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 (for example, 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
404or410HTTP status code - block the page from crawling via a
robots.txt file - block the page from indexing via a
noindexmetatag
This will ensure that the page is permanently removed from Google’s search results for as long as
the page is blocked. If at any time in the future you remove the previously implemented page
blocking method, we may potentially re-crawl and index the page. For immediate and permanent
removal, you can request that a page be removed using the Remove URL tool and then permanently
block the page’s URL before the 90-day expiration of the removal request.
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.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
Related services