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Remove website entries from Google listings    
Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:04

Removing Google  Index listings is not something we are often asked to do. A customer came to me the other day saying they urgently needed to remove references to them on a website, which although it had it's own domain name, was also being hosted as a subfolder on another domain name. The steps we took were as follows.:

1. Stop the website in IIS.
2. Put a robots.txt file in the top level directory of the hosting website to disallow this folder name. This has the effect of preventing to website being indexed in the future.
3. To remove the listings already showing in Google required more positive action. Usually customers WANT to be on the first page of Google searches.
4. Next we renamed all the program script files in the subfolder to .txt, to ensure they could not be found. 
5. Google webmaster tools has a facility to block URLs currently being listed, but only if the website returns a 404 error.
6. Having checked that the index link from the Google searched returned a 'This page cannot be found' error, each URL has to be requested to be blocked individually in webmaster tools. This is done using the menu option Optimisation / Remove URLs.
7. This can only be done if you are the registered 'Google owner' of the hosting website.

This done, we waited to see if the entries did indeed disappear from the Google listings.

The next day, all but one of the 'Remove URL'  requests had been actioned by Google. However, on checking the index, using  different search keywords, we found 7 more entries in the index, including the one that had not been removed the day before.

The persistant URL, had one letter as uppercase, whereas the URL I had typed had it in lower case. We can learn 2 things from this.
1. Google remove URLs is case sensitive (being Windows users, we are not used to this).
2. Its much better to copy and paste the URL from the browser address bar, than to type the URL address.

Amongst the URLs still in the directory, were all the .swf files. These were held in a Flash subfolder. Again we renamed them to .txt files and repeated the process of requesting each individual URL be removed from the Index.

We needed to remove the Google entry, rather than letting it go to a 'page not found' or a holding page on the website, as the sensive information was displayed in the Google description for the entry.

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