At Orchid Box we have gained a lot of experience in understanding the methods used by Google, especially how it caches and indexes websites.
Sometimes clients’ website have urls they don\’t want to be exposed, searchable or even visible to the general public. Previously methods have relied on Google, submitting a URL removal request to Google and hope that they will action it within a 2 month time frame.
Fortunately you can now get your page removed from Google’s search results by following the instructions below:
In order to remove your page from the Google index you need to have the following access:
FTP
Google Webmaster tools
An account with a powerful PR site (such as prlog.org)
1. Remove or take down the page – As an SEO agency we would recommend you use a 301 redirect from the removed page url to your site’s home page.
2. Download your Robots.txt file and add this line: Disallow: /”[removed url]” where the content in square brackets is the url you have removed, less YOURSITE.com.
3. Upload the modified robot.txt file to your root directory.
4. In Webmaster Tools, head to “Site Configuration” > “Crawl Access”, click on “Remove URL” and then click on the new “Removal Request” button
5. Write a quick PR which will send the crawler to the page that you want removed, using your homepage URL as the anchor text i.e. <Your Site Name>
6. You might also want to place a link on the footer to the page to be removed, generally speeding up the process. You can use your site name as anchor text.
We have seen that Google downloads robots.txt file every hour and it checks removal requests every 2/3 hours.
We have been able to de-index pages from Google SERPs within 12 hours of initiating the above 5 action points.
