How to completely remove a site from Google: Moz Experiment

[Dustybones]

Both the Groupon and Moz experiment had short time periods of de-indexing. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you de-indexed for a longer period. What kind of recovery would you have?

Experiment: We Removed a Major Website from Google Search, for Science!

The folks at Groupon surprised us earlier this summer when they reported the results of an experiment that showed that up to 60% of direct traffic is organic.

In order to accomplish this, Groupon de-indexed their site, effectively removing themselves from Google search results. That's crazy talk!

Of course, we knew we had to try this ourselves.

We rolled up our sleeves and chose to de-index Followerwonk, both for its consistent Google traffic and its good analytics setup?that way we could properly measure everything. We were also confident we could quickly bring the site back into Google's results, which minimized the business risks.

And if you want to learn more about the reinclusion process you can visit a post by AdinaToma.

Reinclude Your Content in Google in Less Than 4 Hours

For some time, there has been an amazing buzz around the bad neighborhood SEO issue. In the majority of cases, we can point the finger to the shady SEOs who are building the spammy links on purpose. But there are also situations when you work for a SaaS and the platform?s clients don?t really play by the book, generating tons of low quality links that can sink your website when pointing back to it.