URL Removal Explained, Part I: URLs & Directories

There's a lot of content on the Internet these days. At some point, something may turn up online that you would rather not have out there—anything from an inflammatory blog post you regret publishing, to confidential data that accidentally got exposed. In most cases, deleting or restricting access to this content will cause it to naturally drop out of search results after a while. However, if you urgently need to remove unwanted content that has gotten indexed by Google and you can't wait for it to naturally disappear, you can use our URL removal tool to expedite the removal of content from our search results as long as it meets certain criteria (which we'll discuss below).

We've got a series of blog posts lined up for you explaining how to successfully remove various types of content, and common mistakes to avoid. In this first post, I'm going to cover a few basic scenarios: removing a single URL, removing an entire directory or site, and reincluding removed content. I also strongly recommend our previous post on managing what information is available about you online.

Removing a single URL

In general, in order for your removal requests to be successful, the owner of the URL(s) in question—whether that's you, or someone else—must have indicated that it's okay to remove that content. For an individual URL, this can be indicated in any of three ways:

• block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
• block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag
• indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 status code

Before submitting a removal request, you can check...