Internet Marketing Strategy

We recently made a change to the Remove URL tool in Webmaster Tools to eliminate the requirement that the webpage’s URL must first be blocked by a site owner before the page can be removed from Google’s search results. Because you’ve already verified ownership of the site, we can eliminate this requirement to make it easier for you, as the site owner, to remove unwanted pages (e.g. pages accidentally made public) from Google’s search results.

Once you’ve requested to have a URL removed from the search engine’s result pages, your account will be flagged for a 90 day grace period, during which you can revoke the removal request. Google will continue to spider your website but not display it in results page during this period.

For permanent removal, you must ensure that one of the following page blocking methods is implemented for the URL to be removed:

• indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 HTTP status code
• block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
• block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag

For more information, read more about Easier URL Removals on Google Webmaster Central.