RSS FeedSometimes, you just want to hide from the world. But hiding is not always so easy for a web page! Here’s how to request removal from search engines.
In Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, we explained the basics of using a robots.txt file to control which pages on your website are indexed in the major search engines. Here are page removal instructions directly from the search engines themselves:
The quickest and best way to get a page removed from Google is to sign up for Webmaster tools and use the URL Removal tool.
- Read the Google FAQ about the URL Removal Tool
- Read the Google FAQ about removals in general
- Go to Google’s automatic URL removal page. (You may need to hit refresh after the page loads.)
Yahoo!
- Yahoo!’s instructions regarding URL removal.
Ask
- Ask does not currently include a feature allowing webmasters to request page removal. However, you can ask them not to crawl your site using the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag.
- Read Ask’s Webmaster FAQ
