How can I remove old content from Google’s index? Two Tips on Removing a Single Web Page and an entire Web-Site

During a web-marketing campaign, clients often ask how to remove old content from Google’s index. In order to remove a single web-page or an entire web-site, you need to do the following:

Removing a single web-page

Make sure your web server returns a true 404 code for that single page. If the http status code is not listed or showing up as a 404 code, Google will still think the page is active. If the http status code is 200, Google will not process a removal request. In other words, if it has the wrong status code, Google will still believe the page is active and will not believe it is deleted.

Removing an entire Web-Site

In order to remove an entire web-site, it needs to be blocked in robots.txt. Robots.txt give instructions to a spider (used by search engines to quickly search web-site content) on how to access and visit your site.  A web spider will look to see if the robot.txt has a “user-agent:*” meaning the web-site can be accessed by everyone or a “Disallow: /”, which tells the web spider not to visit any pages on the web-site. Blocking an entire web-site in robots.txt will simply tell the web spider that access to the web-site is no longer allowed.

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