Improving URL removals on third-party sites

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Content on the Internet changes or disappears, and occasionally it's helpful to have search results for it updated quickly. Today we launched our improved public URL removal tool to make it easier to request updates based on changes on other people's websites. You can find it at improved public URL removal tool

The improved public URL removal tool

This tool is useful for removals on other peoples' websites. You could use this tool if a page has been removed completely, or if it was just changed and you need to have the snippet and cached page removed. If you're the webmaster of the site, then using the Webmaster Tools URL removal feature is faster and easier.

How to request a page be removed from search results

If the page itself was removed completely, you can request that it's removed from Google's search results. For this, it's important that the page returns the proper HTTP result code (403, 404, or 410), has a noindex robots meta tag, or is blocked by the robots.txt (blocking via robots.txt may not prevent indexing of the URL permanently). You can check the HTTP result code with a HTTP header checker. While we attempt to recognize soft 404 errors, having the website use a clear response code is always preferred. Here's how to submit a page for removal:

  1. Enter the URL of the page. As before, this needs to be the exact URL as indexed in our search results. Here's how to find the URL.
  2. The analysis tool will confirm that the page is gone. Confirm the request to complete the submission.
  3. There's no step three!

How to request a page's cache and snippet be removed from search results

If the page wasn't removed, you can also use this tool to let us know that a text on a page (such as a name) has been removed or changed. It'll remove the snippet and cached page in Google's search results until our systems have been able to reprocess the page completely (it won't affect title or ranking). In addition to the page's URL, you'll need at least one word that used to be on the page but is now removed. You can learn more about cache removals in our Help Center.

  1. Enter the URL of the page which has changed. This needs t