DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi.
I'm Daniel Waisberg, search advocate at Google.
And today, I'll show you how to request your content
to be temporarily hidden in Google search results,
using the Removals report in Search Console.
And I will also talk about the ways
to review requests made by other users
to remove outdated or inappropriate content
on your site
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Before I go into Search Console capabilities,
I would like to stress that the tool should only be used
for temporary removal requests.
You must take additional steps in order
for your content to be removed permanently.
I'll talk about permanent removal of pages from search
at the end of this video, but check the links
in the description for more detailed information.
In addition, you cannot use the tool to remove personal
information, report offensive information,
or doing anything but managing search results from your own
website.
To remove information from Google,
from the web in general for content you don't control,
check the links in the description.
Now that we are aligned on what can be removed
and for how long, let's talk about the Removals report
in Search Console.
That's the reason we got together today.
The Removals report is divided into three main sections--
temporary removals, outdated content, and safe search
filtering requests.
Let's go over each of them in more detail
to help you understand how to use them effectively.
A temporary removal request is a way
to remove specific content on your site
from Google search results.
For example, if you have a URL that you
need to take off Google search quickly,
you should use this tool.
A successful request lasts only about six months,
which should be enough for you to find a solution
to either allow the content to be seen,
or to remove it permanently.
When you log into Search Console,
you'll find the Removals report in the navigation bar.
Select the Temporary Removal step,
if it's not already selected, to submit a new removal request.
Then, click New Request.
You have two types of requests available.
Temporarily Remove URL will block the URL
from Google search results for about six months.
This will also clear the cached copy of the page.
Use this option as a quick first step
when permanently blocking a page from Google search results.
Clear Cached URL clears the cached page
and wipes out the page description snippet
in search results, until the page is scrolled again
when the snippet is generated from the new content.
Until the next scroll, the page description
will be empty in search results.
Use this option when you remove sensitive information
from a page and want to update your results snippet in Google
search, without removing the page itself from search.
Be sure that you've removed the sensitive information
from your page before clicking this,
or else Google will just recall the page
and find the same content.
For each of these two options, you
can submit a request for a single specific URL,
or for an entire URL prefix.
Make sure you think twice before submitting
a request for an entire prefix, so that you
don't unintentionally block pages that
are important to you.
In the Temporary Removal Section,
you'll find a summary of the page removals requested
through this report in the past six months.
You'll see the URL, the request type, the date requested,
and the status.
You can also use this report to cancel a request,
if it's no longer necessary.
The Outdated Content section provides information
on removal requests made through the Public Remove Outdated
Content tool, which can be used by anyone to update search
results showing information that is no longer present on a page.
This is something that you probably
won't need to look at much, since Google users
can force your pages from search using this tool.
There are two types of requests.
Outdated Cache Removal is used when the page still exists,
but some content has been removed.
Google clears the page snippet in the search result
until the next scroll, and searches
for the removed content will no longer show this page.
Outdated Page Removal is used when the page no longer exists
and a user has requested its removal from the Google search
results.
The report table shows the history
of all submitted requests for this property in the past six
months using the Public Remove Outdated content.
I won't go into the tool in this video,
but you can check the links in the description
to learn more about it.
Whether you're using search at work, with your family,
or for yourself, Safe Search can help filter most sexually
explicit results.
In addition to setting your personal account preferences,
parents can turn on the feature for their kids'
supervised devices.
And workplaces or schools can turn on the filter
at the network level.
The Safe Search Filtering section in Search Console
shows a history of pages on your site
that were reported by Google users
as adult content using the Safe Search Suggestion tool.
URLs submitted using this tool are reviewed,
and if Google feels that this content should be filtered
from Safe Search results, these URLs
are tagged as adult content.
The report table shows the history
of all submitted Safe Search requests
for this property in the past six months.
Check the links in the description,
to learn more about it.
Permanent removals should not really be part of this video,
since it's not requested or reported via Search Console.
But since we're talking so much about temporary removals,
I thought a short explanation might be in order.
To remove content from Google search permanently,
you must take one or more of the following actions.
Remove or update the actual content from your site
and return either a 404 or 410 HTTP status code.
Non-HTML files, like PDFs, should be completely removed
from your server.
Block access to the content, for example,
by requiring a password.
And use a noindex meta tag to indicate that the page should
not be indexed.
This is less secure than the other methods.
Please know that simply redirecting an old page
with a 301 response is not enough to remove it
from Google search results.
And neither will a robots.txt directive
work as a blocking mechanism.
And that's it.
We're done for today.
Hopefully, now you understand how
to request to remove specific content on your site
from Google search results and also how
to track these requests, along with other user removal
requests related to your site.
In the next episode, I'll talk about how
to use Search Console to check security
issues on your website.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Webmasters YouTube
channel where we'll be publishing lots of Search
Console videos.
Stay tuned.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Removed.
Ha!
Got you, Junior.
[LAUGHTER]