Every blogger or webmaster, who possess even a little bit knowledge of SEO (or indexing specifically), must have a regular habit of checking Google index whenever he/she adds a new page to the blog or website; only to verify if Google has indexed the page yet or not. A new page is of not much use to online audience unless it is crawled by search engines, especially Google. Even, I also keep on using many tactics if any of my new content is not yet displayed in Google search results.

Though getting indexed for your content seems like a great achievement, yet we face some instances when we work in a totally opposite direction, worrying about how to remove a page from Google Index.

Yes, you heard it right! Sometimes our pages become outdated or are no longer needed, say we don’t support a service anymore, and hence the related services page has to be dropped. However, getting a page removed from Google Index is much more difficult than getting it indexed. Even if we delete a page from our website, still Google can take much time in removing it from SERPs. This can result into the bad user-experience when some visitor clicks the link to such page from Google and leads to a not found page. Moreover, if there are many such pages on your website which are not-existing but are showing in Google results, then it can harm your website by driving visitors away even for other services, also it can lead to increased bounce rates and many other side-effects.

Many webmasters keep on wondering if there is a way to tell Google about such pages and ask for getting them removed faster than normal. I am going to address a solution here which proved very effective to me, almost every time – Google Webmasters Remove URLs Feature.

Using Webmasters Remove URLs Feature

• Login to Your Google Webmaster Tools Account.
• Click on the Website Profile for which you want to remove a page.
• Under Dashboard, navigate to “Google Index” in left-side menu.
• Click on “Remove URLs” option under it.

• Click on “Create a new removal request” button.
• Enter the Exact URL (case-sensitive) as it appear in search engines, in the text box and click on “Continue” button.
• Choose from provided options, whichever is applicable to your needs:
  • Remove page from search results and cache
  • Remove page from cache only
  • Remove Directory
• At last, click on “Submit Request” button and you’re done.

However, in prior to requesting removal of a page via Google Webmasters, you must first make sure that page should either be blocked by robots.txt/noindex meta tags or by returning a 404 or 410 status code. You can find the more information about Google Removal URLs feature here.

Try this method and share your case-studies, any other method you have figured out to remove a page from Google SERPs or queries, in the comment section below.