Tuesday, 11 April 2017 / Published in SEO

How to block content from Google Search results?

Some of our online readers at WebsiteFix have sent us messages asking questions about process of removing a particular piece of content from Google search results.

This is how you can do it-

Process of Removal

If the content is not published yet, it’s pretty simple process. All you have to do is “No-Follow” and No-Index” the web page. This way you’re telling Google not to index that particular page. Your developer can easily do this or you can install an SEO plugin to do this. Yoast and All in one SEO plugins allow you to no-follow and no-index any web page.

If the content was published in the past, and indexed by Google but you wish to remove it from Google index-

note: below works only if you control the content (a website that you control or you are the verified site owner in Google Search Console)

Option 1: Temporarily hide information from Google Search by filing a URL removal request. It takes around 24 hours to process this request. Note that this is a temporary solution and it will reappear in search results in 3 months.

Option 2: Permanently remove information from Google Search results. To permanently remove your page or file from Google Search:

Add a noindex tag or header to your page. Important: When using this method, be sure that your page is not blocked by a robots.txt file.
OR
Remove an image from search results using robots.txt to block either the image or the page that hosts it.

Needless to mention that you must also contact the host of the content to remove it from their site or blog. Just removing it from Google is not the ultimate solution. Anyone with a link to that content can easily access that content.

If the information no longer exists (to remove cached results)

If the content is already off the web but still showing on Google results (as a result of cached results) you can file a URL removal request

If you don’t control the web page hosting the content, you can do this-

You can request that Google remove it from Google Search results, whether or not you control the page. Visit the Remove Outdated Content tool to remove the page.

We would like to shed light on the fact that Google is not the whole web. It’s a search engine and you may be able to remove the content from Google search results but actual content may still exist on the web. So make sure you remove content both from web and Google if you wish to take it off the web completely.

If you have any further questions you can contact us.

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Vikas Rana

Vikas is the founder and SEO consultant at WebsiteFix. In the last 11+ yrs, Vikas has worked with over 100 SMEs, helped some of Australia's top brands and publicly listed companies.