In digital marketing, indexing pages is very important. However, it may happen that either your product or service is no longer available, or it is out of date. In that case, you need to learn how to remove a page from the Google index. And that is exactly what I will explain in this article. Have a look:
Removing a Page from Google’s Index Step by Step
If you already know how to find out if your site is being indexed by Google, this is the first step you need to take. Confirm this and, if necessary, follow the procedure below on how to temporarily remove a page from Google’s index:
Tell Google what you want
Many don’t know, but you can tell Google when you don’t want a particular page to be or remain indexed. To do this, simply access the Google Search Console tool, “Remove URLs “.
There you can temporarily remove the display of pages owned by you, which are no longer displayed in search results for 90 days. However, you will need to follow some rules, such as:
- do not include anchors in the URL;
- differentiate URLs with uppercase and lowercase letters;
- have a “/” start mark.
Learn about removal options
Within the aforementioned tool, you will need to choose what you want to remove from the search engine. The options are:
- temporarily hide the page from search results and remove it from the cache;
- hide directory temporarily;
- remove the page from the cache only.
First of all, you need to know that the cache is the last information that Google recorded from your website, that is, the last time that Google crawled the page. So, if you don’t want it to show the last change made, choose the option “remove from cache only”.
>> Read Also: How you can Make Content Marketing for Social Networks a Reality in Your Company.
The option “temporarily hide the page from search results and remove it from the cache” deletes the Google page for just 90 days. After that period it reappears.
In addition, you can also choose the option to “remove the page from the directory”, which is highly recommended for sites that have multiple pages with the same content. In such cases, in fact, it is very important to make this exclusion in order to optimize the categories and not suffer from duplicate content.
How to permanently remove a page from Google’s index?
If you want to delete a URL forever, you’ll need to take more than one action. According to Google itself, you will have to:
- Put password on the page in question, in order to block access to the content.
- Update or remove the content of the site, both pages, images, and directories, in addition to ensuring that the server returns HTTP code 404 or 410.
- Include no index Meta tag indicating that the page should not be indexed (least secure method).
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