How can I get a web page removed from google's cache?

[Jeff Maginty]

Wotcha!

I deleted some pages from a website I've been playing around with and they are still showing up in google's search results - because it has apparently cached them. I've done a search for advice and found some people suggesting adding the following tag to a page...

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE” />

...However, since I've already deleted the page from the website I can't do that. Am I supposed to re-add the page with the above NOARCHIVE tag added (and perhaps with content deleted)? Seems a clumbsy way to go about things. Can't imagine I'm the first person to have this problem. Can anyone advise?

Cheers,
Jeff

[d000hg]

If you wait a while won't Google notice and remove them automatically?

[cojak]

Yep, that's what happened to the pages I deleted.

[Jeff Maginty]

Thanks for the quick response guys.

I'm not convinced that google will remove them automatically. Isn't the whole purpose of cached pages to make them available when the main site (or individual pages of it) is offline (for whatever reason)?

I could re-upload the pages with the content stripped out and with the NOARCHIVE meta-tag added, then wait for google to recognise that (ie crawl it) and finally I could remove the pages once google had removed them from its cache. Bit of a ball-ache though.

The other vague possibility seems to be to use the google webmaster tools' "Remove URL" facility. However, this seems to be aimed at removing pages from either indexing or from the cache, which are still available on the site that google crawled. Seems like an obvious omission from googles facilities that they don't provide any means to delete pages from their cache which have already been removed from the website that was originally cached. Of course I'm a newbie to this stuff, so it could be that some sort of facility does exist and I'm therefore talking rubbish!

Cheers,
Jeff.

[adubya]

Yes google will purge them after a while, the cache is there for short term outages. If google presented every single page it had ever indexed in search results then pretty quickly they'd go out of business

[eek]

The remove url facility will accept a url, navigate to it and set in the process of deleting it. That takes some time as the cache is not designed for the removal of data rather the quick retrieval of it.

The only real thing you can do with a page that is cached is accept that it will take time for it to disappear. Your better bet would have been to make it a 301 Moved Permanently redirect to the home page of the site as that provide a page that google can see and refresh.

[AtW]

Register your site in Google Webmaster Tools and ask them to recrawl quickly some urls, it's a recent thing and they might crawl those quicker than usual:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

[NickFitz]

At the risk of stating the obvious: I did a search on Google for "remove page from google's cache" (without the quotes) and the first three results were:

1. Remove a page or site from Google's search results - Webmaster Tools Help
   
   
2. how to remove a cached page of a deleted site from the google search results? - Webmaster Central Help
   
   
3. Remove a "Cached" page - Webmaster Tools Help

[NickFitz]

The other vague possibility seems to be to use the google webmaster tools' "Remove URL" facility. However, this seems to be aimed at removing pages from either indexing or from the cache, which are still available on the site that google crawled.

No, the "Remove URL" tool will remove stuff whether or not it's still on the site; I've used it when a page that was only supposed to be up temporarily was still appearing on Google after being taken down, and it was removed within a few days.

[Jeff Maginty]

No, the "Remove URL" tool will remove stuff whether or not it's still on the site; I've used it when a page that was only supposed to be up temporarily was still appearing on Google after being taken down, and it was removed within a few days.

Thanks Nick.

I've seen that google has crawled the site after I removed the pages, and yet the removed pages are still cached so that would appear to shoot down peoples theories that "...it will just remove them automatically", unless maybe it takes several months?

I think I'll try out the Remove URL facility on one of the pages that I already deleted from the website and see how that goes.

What about the NOCACHE tag, should I add that to the remaining pages on the website?...

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

I've seen another variation on this...

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW,NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE">

I've no idea whether or not these work.

Cheers,
Jeff.