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I made a mistake with one of my sites and a whole bunch of data got picked up by Google before I caught it. I need to fix this relatively fast by asking Google to drop the cached copy of the pages and then re-spider as they wish. The URL would be something like:

domain.com/memberprofile.php?member=XXXXXX

Does anyone know if I can submit:

domain.com/memberprofile.php?member=

as a single request through webmaster tools? If not, what are my other alternatives?

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1 Answer

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I don't think you can delist with a wildcard. Plus a manual delist only lasts for 90 days. You would be better off making a correct robots.txt and letting Google reindex. They should drop your pages that are no longer meant to be crawled, but I don't know how quickly that will occur.

See: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449&hl=en

You should also add the "noindex" meta tag to your memberprofile.php pages.

See: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93710

EDIT: Did a little more digging...

Instructing Google to drop just the cache, not the entire page, from the index.

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

Proper URLs submitted mention nothing about wildcards, and the section about "Multiple URLs" says to submit each one separately. I don't think wildcards are supported, possibly by design.

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=63758

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Thanks jimp. We DO want the pages indexed, but we inadvertently exposed something in the logged out view and didn't catch it for a day or two and Google did what it was supposed to do. I'll check the other link now to see if it will do what I need. – JCL1178 Jun 17 '11 at 18:43
I misunderstood. In that case, it sounds like you don't want the delist feature. I don't think there is a recrawl feature either. Google appears to reindex sites everyday now, so this problem might sort itself out faster than you could do anything manually (assuming no wildcard feature). – jimp Jun 17 '11 at 18:58
@JCL1178, I did a little more research because I was curious. See my edits above. – jimp Jun 17 '11 at 19:14
Yeah, I know all about how to delisting or drop the cached copy and when to do what :) My question is not worded well and I'll fix that. It appears your research and mine are dovetailing, though...Google does not support a way to mass remove URL's for normal folks. – JCL1178 Jun 17 '11 at 20:11

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