Are You Using Google’s URL Remove Tool Properly?

There are a lot of different reasons why you might want to have a page or URL removed from Google's search index. Some of the valid reasons include:

1. If a page contains confidential or sensitive information - Obviously, you never want pages such as these indexed by Google, let alone be accessible to the public.
2. If you have taken down a page permanently - Of course you can always do a redirect, but you can also just have the URL of that page removed from Google's index to ensure that it doesn't even appear in Google's SERPs.
3. If a page has contents that transgresses the law - Whether this page is yours or not, you can submit the URL of the page for removal. Of course, if the page is yours, it makes more sense to just take the page down!

If you need to have a URL removed for the above reasons, the best way to go about it is by using Google Webmaster's UL Removal Tool. The tool allows you to submit a URL to Google directly for removal so that you will get results much faster than if you simply tell Google not to crawl the site by indicating it in your robots.txt file.

Note though that Google says that it should only be used for pages that need to be urgently removed. Matt Cutts even recently warned that excessive use of the URL removal tool can lead to serious repercussions to your site since Google can decide to "broaden, cancel, or narrow" your requests. However, if you really have tons of pages that need to be taken out of Google’s index, what Matt Cutts suggests is that you just remove the entire directory instead of submitting each URL one by one.

Google also suggests that you use other methods for the following instances instead of using the URL removal tool.

1. If a page contains duplicate content - Examples of these are printer friendly pages that you still want to be viewable to visitors who opt to view articles in that format, but that you don't want to outrank the pages that are meant to be the landing pages, especially if the landing pages contain PPC ads. For canonicalization issues such as this, you can always resort to using 301 redirects, use the rel="canonical" attribute to specify the canonical link for each page version, indicate the canonical URL in your sitemap, and use Webmaster to set your preferred domain.
2. Hacked pages - Instead of using the URL removal tool, just clean up the hacked pages and wait for Google to recrawl and reindex the pages. However, you can use the tool to remove any new pages that the hacker has added. Never ever remove the entire website, since this can result in a far longer wait for your cleaned up site to be crawled and indexed.
3. Outdated pages - These pages are a nuisance, especially if they return a 404 error, and while it is understandable that you might want them out of your hair as soon as possible, Google asks that you refrain from using the removal tool to do this. According to Google, they will eventually remove outdated pages from their index anyway once they see it when they recrawl your site.

Vic Carrara
Masterwebsoftware.com

© 2011 Vic Carrara & MasterWebSoftware.com - All Rights Reserved

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