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I want to remove some of my old posts from Google index. I have added rel=nofollow tag in all my posts then from web master tool i have used removed URL option. After two days my post was removed from Google then i have also removed from my website.

But after few days posts is re indexed in Google again which really surprised me even post is no longer active. I want to ask how can i removed this permanently and what is the right way to remove any posts?

Here is Google index result of that post

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3 Answers 3

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For the post to be removed you would be best to add a disallow to your robots.txt file

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /url-of-page

Then submit another removal request.

The reason the page is coming up in Webmaster Tools will probably be because Googlebot is following an external link - if you log in to Webmaster Tools the page will more than likely be in the 404 error report. you can check where Google is getting the location of the page with the 'linked from' tab.

The page will disappear in its own time if it returns a 404 error, but if you disallow it in robots.txt and submit a new removal request then it will be gone for good.

Just to add an edit (I can't add a comment)

From the Webmaster Tools URL removal page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419

If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. Non-HTML file (like PDFs) should be completely removed from your server.

If the page still exists, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, we won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there is an active URL removal request for the page.

So it looks like the only 'tidy' solution is to just let it 404 for a while.

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  • Thanks for your response @janathan Yes it is showing the same as you said in GWT and linked pages are also our internal pages but i have not seen any link of my post.
    – Shobee
    Commented Feb 22, 2014 at 21:01
  • One more thing by adding page in robots.txt it looks so fishy because i have many of pages which needs to removed from Google so i never seen any blog perfroming that task to adding noindex pages in robots.txt file So is there any better solution?
    – Shobee
    Commented Feb 22, 2014 at 21:03
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These all work to help the removal process, but Google WebMasters has a YouTube Video explaining that when a pages goes to 404 statues, and with how many links are being indexed, removed, modified, it is going to take time for them to remove the link permanently from the system.

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a 404 code means that the resource has not been found, but that doesn't mean that it's not going to be there later. What you want to do is more related to the 3xx rules, de depending on what are you doing and your motives, you will have to choose the right option.

  • 301 (moved permanently). You can use this if the post is gone from Internet and you don't want to provide much more explanations on your site. The redirect to your home page or index of posts.
  • 302 (moved temporarily). If you are using a new/different URL to access the same post but later you will go back to the old URL.

The most common situation is a 301 redirect. Here you have a search on how to do the 301 redirect.

robots.txt is not a solution here. It's use is not related to that.

If you uploaded a sitemap to Google, remove those pages/posts from the sitemap.

Of course, remove the physical pages and links that point to them, otherwise, they will keep coming.

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