How To Remove Content from Google's Index

Need to remove content from Google's index?

Google views the quality of its search results as an extremely important priority. Therefore, Google stops indexing the pages on your site only at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for those pages. This policy is necessary to ensure that pages are not inappropriately removed from our index.

Since Google is committed to providing thorough and unbiased search results for our users, we cannot participate in the practice of censoring information on the world wide web.

Removal options

The following removal options are available and take effect the next time Google crawls your site, which is usually within six to eight weeks.

Change the URL of your website
Remove your website
Remove individual pages
Remove snippets
Remove cached pages
Remove an outdated ("dead") link
Remove an image from Google's Image Search

Change the URL of your website

Since Google's crawler associates the content of a page with its URL, there is no way to manually change the URL that is displayed for your website. The URL will be updated the next time we crawl your site. The crawler revisits each site according to an automatic schedule, and we cannot manually accelerate the date on which your site will be recrawled.

If the URL of your website has changed since we last crawled it, you may use the URL submission form and the URL removal methods described below. However, the URL submission form does not take effect immediately, so using the URL removal feature may leave your website inaccessible from Google until we crawl your site again.

Instead of requesting a change from Google, we recommend that you ask the sites currently linked to your old site to update their links (to point to your new site). Also, don't forget to change any entries you may have in the Yahoo! directory and the Open Directory. Finally, if your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will know to use the new URL. Changes made in this way will take 6-8 weeks to be reflected in Google.

Remove your website

If you wish to exclude your entire website or a specific section (directory) of your server from Google's index, you can place a file at the root of your server called robots.txt.

To prevent Google and other search engines from crawling your site, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-Agent: * Disallow: /

This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html.

Note: If you believe your request is urgent and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, use our automatic URL removal system. In order for this automated process to work, your webmaster must first create and place a robots.txt file on the site in question.

Google will continue to exclude your site or directories from successive crawls if the robots.txt file exists in the web server root. If you do not have access to the root level of your server, you may place a robots.txt file at the same level as the files you want to remove. Doing this and submittting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 90 day removal of your site from the Google index. (Keeping the robots.txt file at the same level would requre you to return to the URL removal system every 90 days to reissue the removal.)

Remove individual pages

If you want to prevent all robots from indexing individual pages on your site, then you can place the following meta tag element into the page's HTML code:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

If you want to allow other robots to index individual pages on your site, preventing only Google's robots from indexing the pages, use the following tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

More information on this standard meta tag element is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#meta.

Note: If you believe your request is urgent and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, use our automatic URL removal system. In order for this automated process to work, your webmaster must first insert the appropriate meta tags into the page's HTML code.

Remove snippets

A snippet is a text excerpt from the returned result page that has all query terms bolded. The excerpt allows users to see the context in which search terms appear on a web page, before clicking on the result. Users are more likely to click on a search result if it has a corresponding snippet.

If you wish to prevent Google from displaying snippets for your pages, use the following tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Note: removing snippets also removes cached pages.

Note: If you believe your request is urgent and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, use our automatic URL removal system. In order for this automated process to work, your webmaster must first insert the appropriate meta tags into the page's HTML code.

Remove cached pages

Google keeps the text of the many documents it crawls available in a cache. This allows an archived, or "cached", version of a web page to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page's web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it. The cached page also includes a message (at the top of the page) to indicate that it's a cached version of the page.

If you want to prevent all robots from archiving content on your site, use the NOARCHIVE meta tag. Place this tag in the<HEAD> section of your documents as follows:

If you want to allow other indexing robots to archive your page's content, preventing only Google's robots from caching the page, use the following tag:

Note: this tag only removes the "cached" link for the page. Google continues to index the page and display a snippet.

Google updates its entire index automatically on a regular basis. When we crawl the web, we find new pages, discard dead links, and update links automatically. Links that are outdated now will most likely "fade out" of our index during our next crawl.

Option 1: If you have access to the server that hosts your image or the site's webmaster:

If you need an image removed from Google's image index we require participation either by you or by the site's webmaster. Please add a robots.txt file to the root of the server. (If you can't put it in the server root, you can put it at directory level.)

Example: If your site is www.yoursite.com/images/dogs.jpg and you want Google to exclude the dogs.jpg image found on your site, you need to create a page called www.yoursite.com/robots.txt and on this page you need to place the following text:

To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

Option 2: If you do not have any access to the server that hosts your image:

To have an image removed from our image search service, you must provide a written communication (email or regular mail) that sets forth the items specified below. Please note that you may be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that you own an image when you in fact do not. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether you have the right to request removal from our image search service, we suggest that you first contact an attorney.

To expedite our ability to process your request, please use the following format (including section numbers):