: How to permanently remove my blog post from Google's index? 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

@RJPawlick198

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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@Cofer257

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: 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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