Sujal Negi, Author at AlgoSaga Digital Marketing Blog

Sujal Negi

Sujal Negi is a versatile content writer and has more than five years of experience in SEO, video marketing, eCommerce marketing, and other digital marketing services. From articles and blogs to guest posts, scripts, and news, he creates diverse content that enhances brand presence and drives meaningful online interactions.

SEO mainly focuses on visibility and increasing search engine ranking. Sometimes, we need to remove URLs which are outdated, duplicate, or indexed pages with sensitive information. These pages negatively impact your website and can raise security concerns. Hence, we are going to discuss the various ways to remove such URLs from search engine.

5 Best Ways to Remove URLs from Google Search

There are several ways to remove URLs from the search engine results page. Be careful when choosing the best one for your scenario. Here, we will explore the 5 best methods to remove URLs from search engine results pages.

Delete the content: The easiest method of making URLs from search engine results unavailable is to remove the page from the website. The users, or Google will get a 404 error when trying to open the deleted page. However, the page may still appear in the search engine results page, due to temporary cache copy. Google re-crawls the page, after then it will be removed from serps.
Noindex: You can use the noindex meta tag or x-robots header to make it removed from serps. noindex meta tag can be used like:
Restricting access: If you want to keep a page accessible to specific users but hidden from search engines crawlers, then you need to use either Login panel HTTP Authentication or IP Whitelisting approach. Such configurations are often used for intranet, member area, or staging purposes.
URL Removal Tool: Google provides a URL removal tool available in Google Search Console so that you can remove content from search results for about six months. This method is used in some cases that need immediate removal, including security concerns, data leaks, or the presence of personal information.
Canonicalization: When you have many versions of a page, and you want to combine to just one version of the page, you can use the “canonicalization” method. It will avoid duplicate content by displaying the specified address in the search results.

When to Use the URL Removal Tool

Google Search Console’s URL Removal Tool temporarily hides the content you want from search engine results. However, it’s important to understand when this tool should be used. Here are some scenarios such as:

Urgent Removal of Sensitive Information: Using this URL Removal Tool, you can hide some pages when you disclose personal information or if your website was hacked and its owner wants these pages removed from search results.
Outdated Content in Search Snippets: If you update the content but still don’t want that outdated information shown in the search results, then use the URL Removal tool to clear the page’s cached version.
No Access to Website: When your website lacks the necessary files and server, the URL Removal Tool efficiently removes pages from Google search results directly through Google Search Console.

Conclusion

Managing how your website appears in Google search results is essential for having a professional online presence and preventing sensitive information from being leaked. AlgoSaga digital marketing agency understands the crucial technical issues, so we offer technical SEO consultant services for assistance removing URLs and other issues of your website.