I had a major issue in the last week where a site was found to be showing huge numbers of pages that it shouldn't have been. Naturally Google indexed all of these pages!
Rather than manually remove 5000+ links, I thought the nuclear option of removing the whole site would be the best option (using the Remove URL tool with no URL provided), since the site was poorly ranking anyway.
I had read that this was a good way to reset your site if you wanted to start over.
I removed the site, then after confirming that Google had removed it, I resubmitted the site for indexing and submitted a new sitemap and a new robots.txt to prevent indexing of the restricted pages.
The sitemap shows that it is indexed (or at least, a large portion of it is indexed) and I can see the Googlebot activity on the site.
However, on my dashboard I see severe health problems listed, with the main one being important page removed and a link to the removal request for the main site.
Furthermore, there are no links to the site in the Google index (when tested against site:example.com
in a search).
Do I need to reinclude the site using the removal tool? If I do this, will it re-add all the bad URLs that I was trying to get rid of?