Remove a Page From Search Engines
A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to get their pages indexed on Search Engines; however, there are circumstances where you may wish to remove content from Search Engines. This article explains how you can remove you pages from Search Engines.
Server You have access to
There are many reasons why you may want your content removed from Search Engines. Here is a list of reasons that I’ve come up with:
- Outdated/inaccurate content
- Duplicate content
- You just don’t like Google, Bing or Yahoo
- Parked domains
- Development server
Server Access
Here are some examples of how you can remove a single page from search engins.
Using a meta tag
You can add a meta tag to the specific page you do not want to show up in search engines.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
Don’t use robots.txt
Robots.txt won’t remove your page from google, it will only stop Google’s crawler from indexing the site.
To learn more about robots.txt, read my article.
Remove your pages from Google
Here is a video where Matt Cutts talks about how to remove your content from Google.
He also touches on the best way to disallow a page and provides examples.
No Server Access
As far as I know your pretty much out of luck here.
Matt Cutts talks about the problem in his blog. You could always try to make a request with Google’s webpage removal request tool