Google`s New Content Removal Tools - Webmaster Tools
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When you get to Webmaster Central you will be provided with six links; one is called "Webmaster tools (including site maps)." It is this particular aspect of Webmaster Central we are interested in. Incidentally, the others are quite useful too; they feature discussions and a means of checking how many of your pages are indexed by Google, among other things.
The webmaster tools allow you to submit your site map, check how frequently the Googlebot has crawled your pages and when it requested pages from your site last, and errors it experienced while it was crawling your site. They also allow you to run diagnostics and checks on your site.
Before you can use all of these features, Webmaster Central will require you to sign in to use the tools. You will need to have a Gmail account for this (coercion I say!). I believe that there are very few Google users out there without Gmail by now.
After you sign in to the Dashboard, which will be indicated on the top of the page when you click through to it, the Dashboard will require you to add your website URL. Note that it is also on the Dashboard that you report incidences of spammers and submit re-inclusion requests if you have been removed from the Google Index.
Google "auto detected" my IP address and logged me into the Dashboard without my filling in anything; it probably helped that my Gmail account was up and running. After giving me a form with which to add my site URL it asked me to verify the URL by either uploading a particular HTML file from the site to Webmaster Central or by adding a meta content value to the home page of the site. Ergo I call up my brother and harangued him to pass the cpanel password to me pronto; then I remembered that I handled the hosting and start digging into the archives.
By the time you verify your ownership of the site by following the instructions, you can start having some serious fun with the Dashboard. Google gives you comprehensive statistics on the Webmaster Tools page concerning your web site. To get access to remove pages from the index or from the cache, you navigate to the "Diagnostics," and then to the "Remove URL page." This is to the left.
Once you have navigated to the "Diagnostics" and "remove URL" page you fill in the options and remove an individual file, a directory, a cached copy or even an entire site. These tools provide a vast improvement in performance over the past methods used in removing pages from Google. Back then you would pretty much have to wait until Google refreshed their index; that's a factor over which you have little or no control.
Please take note: to make sure that these tools work as advertised, you will have to modify your robots.txt file, add a meta content value to block the desired file(s), or delete the pages manually, so when the Googlebot requests the pages it will be served a 404 response from the server (server to requester: "I can't find this file, it has either been moved or permanently deleted"). Once the request for the files to be removed from the index or from the cache has been submitted (and the required robot exclusion protocols followed), the tool will process the request in a couple of days.
You can monitor the progress of your request over time on your Dashboard; you can also remove your request before it is accepted. You monitor your progress using the "current requests" tab in the "Remove URL" page where its status is shown (Pending, Removed or Denied). Once removed, the file is not added no matter what for the next six months (unless you specifically request re-inclusion from the Dashboard).
After six months Google returns to normal crawling and indexing. If you want the pages permanently removed you must still have your existing protocols excluding bots from those pages in place. Apart from your robots protocol, permanently removing the pages (an HTTP 404 response from your server) will of course ensure that the files are not included again.
Next: Removing Cached Copies >>
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