What do you do if you accidentally put too much information on your website? If you use a content management system (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) or have access to your website you can take down excess or unneeded information fairly easily. Pages can be removed and information can be hidden but what can you do if the information is already showing up in search results? Or cached results? Here is a quick and easy method for removing a page from Google Search Results pages:
Removing a Page from Google Search Results
1. Access your Google Account (if you don’t have one, sign up)
If you have a Google account, you should be able to log into the Google’s Webmasters section. After your website it set up, you can use some of the many tools Google offers. The tool you need to remove a page is called “removals.” Here is a link to the removals page: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals.
2. Get the URL of the page you want removed from search results (e.g. www.mycompany.com/aboutus.html)
URLs include pages, images, documents, etc. Basically anything on your server. If you can access the content through your website, Google can find it too.
3. Move and/or delete the page
The page cannot exist on the URL you are requesting to be removed from the Google Search.
4. Remove the URL
Fill out and submit a removal request, follow the instructions and wait. It may take a little while before the URLs are completely removed.
As you can see, Google has made this a relatively quick and painless process. However, if you want to have multiple pages you want removed from Google, it may take some time.
