How to Remove Pages and Images from Google's Search Results: A Complete Guide

If you've ever needed to remove a specific webpage or image hosted on your website from Google's search results, you might know how overwhelming the process can seem at first. Fortunately, it's not as complex as it appears. This blog post provides a step-by-step guide on how to effectively remove content from Google's search results.

Removing a Page Hosted on Your Site from Google

To get a page removed swiftly, make use of Google's Removals tool. This tool can erase a page from Google's search results within 24 hours.

Keep in mind, the page URL you submit should be the exact one you wish to remove. Different URLs can point to the same page (for instance, example.com/puppies, example.com/PUPPIES, example.com/petchooser?pet=puppies). Therefore, it's necessary to block or remove all variations of the URL for the content you want to remove.

Making Your Removal Permanent

After using the Removals tool, your page will be excluded from Google Search results for around 6 months. To permanently block a page, you have three options:

1. Update or Remove Content: Alter the information on your page, or delete it entirely. This ensures the page won't appear in other search engines that may ignore the noindex tag. Also, it guarantees that other individuals can't access your page.

2. Password-Protect Your Page: Limit access to your page, allowing only the right users to view it. This prevents Googlebot and other web crawlers from accessing it.

3. Add a Noindex Tag: Adding a noindex tag prevents your page from appearing in Google search results. However, users and other search engines that don't support noindex can still access your page.

Important Note: Don't use robots.txt as a way to block your page. While it can be used to guide search engine bots, robots.txt has several limitations. This is because while robots.txt can stop bots from crawling certain pages, it does not prevent these pages from being indexed and appearing in search results. If a page is linked from elsewhere on the web, Google can still index it, even without crawling it. This is a crucial distinction — robots.txt controls crawling, but it doesn't directly control indexing.

Removing an Image from Google's Search Results

To quickly remove an image hosted on your site from Google's search results, you can use the Removals tool. There are two additional methods to remove images:

1. Using Robots.txt Disallow Rules: Add a robots.txt file to your server's root that blocks the image. This provides more flexibility and control through the use of wildcards or subpath blocking. It applies to all search engines, not just Google. Remember to specify Googlebot-Image as the User-agent in the robots.txt file to exclude images from Google Images.

2. Using the Noindex X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header: This method involves adding the noindex X-Robots-Tag to the HTTP response headers of the image resources you wish to remove. In this case, you must allow Googlebot to crawl the image URLs to extract the noindex rule.

Removing Information from Other Google Properties

Content can be removed from other Google properties, such as Google Shopping or your Google Business Profile. You'll need to consult the specific help documentation for each product to learn how to remove content.

What if You Don't Own the Content?

For content removal from sites that you don't own or control, Google provides a separate help resource titled "Remove your personal information from Google".

In Conclusion

Managing your web presence involves not only creating and promoting content but also knowing when and how to remove it from search engine results. With the strategies outlined in this blog post, you'll be well-equipped to remove any unwanted pages or images from Google's search results.

Remember that the Removals tool is a powerful feature for quick removals, while robots.txt and noindex provide more long-term solutions. Choose the method that best suits your website's needs.