Generally, all site owners want Google to index and/or crawl as many contents on their sites as likely possible. But sometimes, we realize that we have inadvertently let the user agents (search engines) index sensitive data or confidential information we do not want promulgated and we want to remove it as fast as possible. This piece of article talks about how to effectively remove a page from Google.
Though there are a couple of available methods we can use to prevent sensitive contents from being displayed in search results, but many at times, content we do not want indexed still shows in the results. How can you then remove a page from Google? As we all know, Google displays search results as per what is available on the internet. As such, you cannot expect them to remove a page that would be added back the next time they crawl it.
So to remove a page from Google, you need to block up the page with either robots meta tag or robots.txt file or you take the page out from the website and yield a 410 or 404 for the link. Once this is done, you can then wait for Google to do recrawl, and automatically this will drop out.
However, if you can’t wait for next Google recrawl, you can make use of link removal tool of Google (webmaster tools) to make a request to remove a page from Google. First access the verified website in webmaster tools, click site configuration link, then click crawler access and remove url links respectively. There is a dashboard that allows individual to manage his or her url removal requests. Select new removal request option and enter the link to the page you would like to remove. Click the option to remove it from cache and search results, then click return a 404 or 410 code or blocked up by robots.txt checkbox. After this, the request will indicate in the dashboard with a pending status.
An entire directory can be removed in similar fashion you remove a page from Google. If you have removed the content from the webpage and it brings back the status code, the directory still has to be blocked in the robots.txt file. Once this is done, select remove directory.