How to Use the Removal Tool in Google Search Console
Every once in a while, you might have a situation where you want to take a web page out of Google. This is one such instance, I have a couple pages on my own website that are appearing in Google.
0:15 They are system pages, I run my site on Kajabi and they are there by default, I can’t turn them off. So there’s nothing I can do, at least easily on the Kajabi end to take those pages out of Google. But I don’t want them showing up here. If somebody does a search for TheWebinaut by name, I don’t want them to enter through the Store page directly because that page will be blank.
0:40 So here’s what you do in this situation…
0:42 Go to Google Search Console, go to your property, and down on the left hand side, look for “removals”. Click on that.
0:52 Be sure to go back over and copy the exact URL that you want to have removed. And in Google Search Console, click “submit a new request”.
1:01 Enter that URL, and you want to remove that “URL only” – not the “URLs with that prefix” because that would mean that anything, if that were say your blog page like this, and you wanted to remove that page, selecting this option would remove all URLs with this prefix. That would mean that everything inside your blog would also would also be removed. So you want to remove this URL only. And we want it to be store.
1:04 Go ahead and click “Next”. Double check everything. Looks good. “Submit Request”. And we’ll see how long that takes. Usually, I would say that this probably takes a day or two. We’ll see. I’ll check back with an update.
1:51 Okay, so it’s been less than 48 hours. In that same Google search, (for “The Webinaut”) I can see that the page I was trying to take out of Google has been removed. If I go over to my Google Search Console dashboard to the removals tool, I can see that this has been removed.
2:06 It does say temporarily removed. I’m not sure exactly why it wasn’t a permanent removal, but I can see that has been removed and I can keep an eye on this. My guess is that this URL will not show up again in search results, but on the off-chance that it does. I can come right back here. This will stay in my dashboard. So I can always come back to this page and see the status.