Removing a page from search cache
October 28th, 2009 | by david |I had someone (very nice) e-mail me to have me help them remove their info that has been stuck in google’s index for many months. She had posted an ad with us, and several months ago asked us to delete her ad – a very normal thing, which we always honor within one day.
Well, if you do a search for her on google, and weird URL for our site comes up that isn’t even the right structure of URL’s we use, and some of her ad info is being pulled in – however, the ad page with her info has been removed for many months – it is not on the remote server – so nowhere on our site is her information still active on our site.
The weird URL structure is…weird – her ad “address’ appears after /index.cfm/ (the homepage file for our site – which is completely strange.
Anyways, she went into google’s webmaster tools, and asked them to remove the information by submitting a support request. We’ll see if it happens, which I hope it does. This is uncharted water for me – almost always if you remove a page, within a reasonable amount of time it is removed from search results.
I am reluctant to do a “404″ for the page, as I don’t want the index page of our site 404′ed as well – I’ll have to look into that more after I do a little more research. It just makes me a little nervous…