How to Remove URL From Google Search (4 Methods) Written by AMAN SINGH
Are you looking for ways to remove URLs from Google? There are different ways to remove URLs from Google. But using the wrong way can negatively impact SEO. If you want to remove a URL from Google, then in this step by step guide, you will learn many different ways to do this.
How to Check If URLs are Indexed You can check it easily. Just need to type site: yourdomain.com in Google search engine. This will show search results and tell you if a page is indexed.
You can also check indexation by using Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. The Coverage section reports you which pages of your site are indexed in Google. It also tells you about errors and warnings that prevent pages from being indexed. In this section you will see some tabs: ● Error – The page is not indexed. After fixing the error, you can click on the Validate fix option. Google will test URLs again. ● Valid – Shows your site’s index page in search engine. ● Valid with Warning – The page is indexed, but there is a problem you need to fix.
● Excluded – The page is not indexed. You may have excluded it by noindex, or it may be a duplicate of a canonical page that we have already indexed on your site.
URL Inspection Tool (for an individual URL) is another method to check indexing. This tool tells you if a page is indexed and provide additional information on how Google is treating the page.
Why Remove Link From Google There may be several reasons for removing links from Google search results. But the main reason may be low quality content. Low-quality content affects your website SEO and ranking negatively. If you have a bunch of pages that are indexed that shouldn’t be, your website will lose a ranking position.
That’s why you should remove negative content from Google search that impacts your website.
How to Remove URL From Google There are two main ways to remove links from Google. But there are also ways you can remove a URL that I will cover.
Removing a URL using Google Search Console It is very easy to remove URLs from Google using Google Search Console’s Removals tool. This tool enables you to block pages from Google Search results. Here are the steps to do so: Login to your Google Search Console account then click on Removals. In this page, you will see ● Temporary Removal Requests ● Outdated Content ● SafeSearch Filtering
Temporary Removal Requests – There are two types of removal requests available: ● Temporarily remove URL: Block URL from Google Search results for about six months and clear current snippet and cached version. ● Clear cached URL: Keep URL in Google Search results. Just clear current snippet and cached version.
Outdated Content: There are two types of reports within in the outdated content report: ● Outdated cache removal: The page still exists, but some content has been removed. ● Outdated page removal: The page no longer exists, and has been cleared from the Google index and search results.
SafeSearch Filtering – Displays a list of URLs on your site that were reported as adult content. Just click on the Temporary Removal Requests to temporarily remove the links you want to remove. Then click on New Request.
An input field will appear. Now you have to enter the URL and click on Next.
This will confirm to you: Remove URL?… You just need to click on SUBMIT REQUEST.
Give it a day or two and then your URL will be removed from Google.
Using Noindex Robots Meta Tags Noindex meta robots tag directive to search engines to remove a page from the index. If you are a WordPress user and using ​Yoast SEO plugin​, you can easily prevent get Google to index your URLs. Go to your post editor then navigate to Yoast SEO section and click on Advanced option.
After that select ‘No’ from the drop-down option of “Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?”. You can screenshot below.
Now your URL will be removed from Google search. But it will take some time.
Delete the URL If the URL you want to remove from Google, then you can simply delete it from your site. When the URL show either a 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) status code, then the page will be removed from the index after the page is re-crawled. The page you want to remove may have traffic or inbound links that provide SEO value then it may be better to use a 301 redirect to a similar page.
Create Canonical Tags This is mostly to prevent duplicate content. Canonical tag to tell search engines that there is another primary page or preferred URL to index. If pages are duplicate or very similar, you should set a Canonical tag (rel=”canonical). When pages are too different, canonical may be ignored.
How to Remove an Entire Website From Google If your site is on WordPress and want to remove an entire website from Google then go to WordPress dashboard >> Settings >> Reading. And check the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.
You can also block your site from being crawled by search engine bots by adding this to your robots.txt file. User-agent: * Disallow: /
How to Remove URLs From Sites You Don’t Own If you own the content and someone has copied your content. You can use Google’s Copyright Removal tool to do. It requests the removal of any copyrighted material.
Conclusion As you can see several options to remove a URL from Google’s index. But if you want to remove the URLs permanently, from Google search then the noindex tag is the best way to do it. If you have any questions, let me know in the comment box. And now it’s your turn! Find this article helpful? Don’t forget to share! FURTHER READING
● How to Get Google to Instantly Index Your Website ● How to Create Backlinks (11 New Strategies)
● Internal Linking for SEO: Why and How ● How to Add Nofollow Link in WordPress ● Dofollow and Nofollow Links in SEO