Any fast methods for removing a page from SERPs?

[Ian Hammond]

Hi!

We have a client who has recently gotten into trouble with a local utility company for listing information about the utility's rebate and weatherization programs. The utility thinks the pages in question on our client's site somehow gives the appearance of favoring the contractor over another. Ok. Most utility and rebate programs don't have an issue with this stuff that is neither here nor there.

We have unpublished and deleted the two pages in question, updated the sitemap, resubmitted the sitemap to Search Console, and flushed any server caches we can think of. A couple of weeks later and one page is still showing up pretty easily in SERPs for "company + utility" searches:

With the page being deleted the first listing obviously ends up with a 404 but still, it's there. The utility is still giving the client flack for ending up in Google results.

We are assuming this is more on the Google caching side of things but if anyone has any good ideas for forcing Google to forget this page ever existed, we are all ears!
(and then we will have to convince everyone involved to flush the caches in their own browsers)

thank you! Ian

 

[djbaxter]

Use a 410 redirect instead.

How to properly delete a page from your site

Want to delete a page from your site? This post explains the options you have when deleting a page and helps you choose the right one.

yoast.com

Syntax in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^pagename(.*)$ - [NC,R=410,L]

or Redirect 410 {full URL for page}

It will still take a while for it to drop out Google's index but you can at least then say you have done your due diligence.

 

[pony]

After doing the above you can have Google crawl the URL again individually through the URL inspection tool. If they see the 410 status code then then you are probably on the fastest route to having it deindexed as possible.

 

[Suresh]

Make the 410 HTTP response codes for those URL's Or Leave the 404 error codes as it is.

And

do use the google indexing API to remove the URL from the SERP

Indexing API Quickstart | Google Search Central | Google for Developers

Get a quick overview of what the Indexing API can do, and how to get started.

developers.google.com

Remove a URL code

How to Use the Indexing API | Google Search Central | Google for Developers

Learn how to use the Indexing API to tell Google Search to update or remove pages with JobPosting or BroadcastEvent markup from the Google index.

developers.google.com

Also, you can do the batch delete.

How to Use the Indexing API | Google Search Central | Google for Developers

Learn how to use the Indexing API to tell Google Search to update or remove pages with JobPosting or BroadcastEvent markup from the Google index.

developers.google.com

 

[keyserholiday]

Hey @Ian Hammond use this resource: Remove URLs Tool - Search Console Help You can hide or remove any URL with the Removal Tool in Google Search Console.

 

[Ian Hammond]

Thanks, all! Appreciate the insight.

 

[Conor Treacy]

We use the tool that @keyserholiday mentioned on a somewhat regular basis after doing audits for new clients. There's always something that needs to be removed, and after deleting the page, or no-index, we submit to Google and it's gone within a few hours.