Now that 2013 is almost over, we'd love to take a quick look back, and venture a glimpse into the future. Some of the important topics on our blog from 2013 were around mobile, internationalization, and search quality in general. Here are some of the most popular new posts from this year:
Where are we headed in 2014? Only time will tell, but I'm sure we'll see more information for the general webmaster, hard-core technical advice, ways to make mobile sites even better, rockin' Webmaster Tools updates, tips on securing your site & its connections, and more. Are you ready? Don't forget your towel & let's go!
On behalf of all the webmaster help forum guides, we wish you happy holidays & a great 2014.
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 & cached page removed. If you're the webmaster of the site, then using the Webmaster Tools URL removal feature is faster & 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:
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.
The analysis tool will confirm that the page is gone. Confirm the request to complete the submission.
There's no step three!
How to request a page's cache & 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 & 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.
Enter the URL of the page which has changed. This needs to be the exact URL as indexed in our search results. Here's how to find the URL.
Confirm that the page has been updated or removed, and confirm that the cache & snippet are outdated (do not match the current content).
Now, enter a word that no longer appears on the live page, but which is still visible in the cache or snippet. See our previous blog post on removals for more details.
We hope these changes make it easier for you to submit removal requests! We welcome your feedback in our removals help forum category, where other users may also be able to help with more complicated removal issues.
