| Google's URL Removal Really Works |
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| Friday, 11 May 2007 | |
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A few months back, I blogged that Google was becoming more choosy on the pages it crawled and that having a few high-quality pages on a site might be a better strategy than a lot of low-quality pages. Our suggested solution was to add unwanted URLs and directories to your robots.txt file. However, that's an imperfect solution because search engines don't always obey the directions in robots, nor do they act quickly. Fortunately, there's a new, improved solution....
In late April, Google announced that it was adding a URL Removal tool to its Webmaster console.
The URL Removal ToolLate last night, I decided to give it a try and entered some directories that robots.txt had failed to remove:
The ResultsWhen I woke up in the morning and Google was telling me its job was finished:
I checked the SERPs and it was true - the pesky URLs really were gone. The URL removal tool had done more good in 8 hours than robots.txt had in 8 weeks.
I'd still suggest using robots.txt, particularly to deal with Yahoo and MSN, but Google's URL removal works and works fast.
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Comments (6)
  written by Jufy, May 14, 2007
Is this a useful tool to remove pages that are listed at Supplemental in Google?
 written by steve, May 14, 2007
Hi Jufy
Yes - if they are pages that you think are really low quality (PDF pages, print pages etc.) then its worth using this to remove them. If its a quality page thats stuck in supplemental, I'd work on returning it to the regular index. Steve written by Chad McKissick, May 17, 2007
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the great information! I have noticed during my experimentation, google will deny removal of URLs, as well. These old URLs were from an old blog under the same domain. To date they are non-existent URLs and return a 404 for myself, and to google but they denied me from removing them for whatever reasons. I am suspecting this is due to the fact I was not toying with SEO, google webmaster tools, and their analytics until now. Could be because my old blog under the same domain was never verified using google's tools. I am currently experimenting with different SEF solutions, and doing so have produced a rather scary amount of errors (404's) in google's indexing. I am trying a different approach to removing those pages. Instead of removing the URLs altogether I am going to try for a 'cache removal' instead and see how that fairs. Thanks for all the tips! Chad written by John, June 13, 2007
The "works and works fast" comment is not very accurate. I submitted about 5 static URLs for removal using Google's URL Removal Tool about a week ago.
Each was Disallowed in the robots.txt file and removed from the server (returning a 404 when attempting to access). The status still shows pending, as I suspect in will next week, and the next... written by penis enlargement, April 02, 2008
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