There are instances in which Google may index a page, post, or entire website that you would prefer not remain in the search results. It is important to make sure first and foremost that any private information (such as customer data) not be served to the public side of your page at all. However, if there was an error, or some part of your website was indexed by search, or if you would simply prefer that your website not be present in the search engine anymore, you must request the removal of your content, and this article will tell you how to submit that request to Google via Google Search Console. Unfortunately, there is no “remove website from Google” button, but this article will help point you in the right direction toward a resolution.
This article instructs you on how to request a URL removal from the Google search engine, but if your content has been indexed by other search engines, you will need to request removal there as well. Requesting a removal from Google will only take effect with Google search.
How to Remove Website From Google Search
Follow along with the steps below to see how to remove site from Google search:
- Log into Google Search Console
- Click Removals from left side panel
- Click New Request
- Submit your URL
Now that your request has been submitted to Google, you will want to check back again later to check the request status. The status will be listed in the table on the Removals page.
To Ensure Proper Content Removal
To ensure your content is permanently removed from the search results, you’ll need to do one of the following steps within 90 days of requesting the URL to be removed. If you do not, your content may appear in the search results.
- If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a “404 not found” or a “410 Page Gone” error message. Non-HTML files such as PDFs should be completely removed from the server.
- If the page still exists, use a robots.txt file to prevent Google from crawling the specific page. Even if a URL is disallowed by the robots.txt file, Google may still index the page if they find it’s URL on another site. However, Google will not index the page if it’s blocked in the robots.txt file and there is an active URL removal request for the page.
Please review our article on using a robots.txt files to block search engines from crawling a website. If you need further assistance please feel free to contact our support department.
