Removing a URL from your oft visited site can be a real headache. The problem is, it can still show up in search results. If users click on the link from Google search and don’t find content, it really dings your reputation. Well, there is an easy solution to that problem.
The first thing you should do is request Google to remove the URL from their index. Once Google has verified that you are the legitimate owner of the URL, they will still crawl it, but won’t show it in their search results. It will be deleted from the index as well, after 90 days, and you can sleep peacefully.
Permanent removal
- 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
