How do I remove a page from Google’s index?
It’s snowing, here in Long Island. It’s not amounting to much, but parents all over (this morning) were nagged by their children to see if school was closed? With the internet being second nature to people, one parent went on Google and typed in Long Island School Closings. They found our page, (clearly with a time and date stamp on it) from 12/21/2009 and saw that their school was in fact closed. She then proceeded to call all of her friends and neighbors, informing them that their school was closed.
By 10am, we received this letter:
Your web site today listed the XYZ Schools as a two hour delayed opening today (January 8, 2010) due to snow.For your information, the school district opened on time. You listed many other schools as delayed opening or being closed. They also opened on time.
I am going to recommend to our school superintendent that she have no contact with your paper any longer regarding school closings. Maybe other parents in other school districts will take the same action based on your providing misinformation this morning.
This was a good learning lesson, in that we did not have one centralized place for “School Closings”. The writers published the story as an article. An easy fix for that was to create a new section named “/schoolclosings”.
Because I want to utilize the SERP position we had for that term,we created outbound links from the page, that Google knew of and directed it to our new page. We did our proper optimization (H1, H2, summary description) of the new page. We also changed the text on the page to read “No School Closings Reported for 1/8/2010″ – only below the link to our new page.
Sometime next week I will request that Google removes the old page from their index. It’s a very simple two-step process:
- Add a line to our robots.txt file ( Disallow: /2009/12/long-island-school-closings-and-delays/)
- Using the Google Webpage Removal Request Tool, request that they remove the outdated content.
Again, it was a very easy fix and a great exercise for everyone involved.
google page removal tool, removing a page from google, webpage removal request tool
Ignoring the point of the post…
Is that a fictitious letter? Besides the fact that SE displays the date it was posted, the URL includes the date it was posted AND at the bottom of the article it displays the date it was posted… It scares me that someone with a lack of common sense is around (or has their own) children.
true story. I removed the name of the person and their school district school.