: Can't Remove Page from Google High. My name is Festus. I'm creating a web site for a customer and would prefer not to have Google index the site while it's still being developed. The customer,

@Welton855

Posted in: #Google

High. My name is Festus.

I'm creating a web site for a customer and would prefer not to have Google index the site while it's still being developed. The customer, on the other hand, must be able to access the unfinished site.

My solution was to give the site an unusual hostname. I used myCustomerName.domainName.com with the thought that there's no way Google would be able to guess that hostname and therefore crawl/index it.

Nevertheless, Google found and indexed the page despite my 100% certainty that there are no external sites that link to it. I found out later that someone at the customer's site had been typing myCustomerName.domainName.com into the Google search engine instead of the address bar. That's how Google found out about it. (I have no idea why someone would type the custom hostname into Google's searchbox instead of the address bar, but they did).

Now unfortunately the site shows up in Google as a search engine result. Here's what I've done so far.

(1) I researched robots.txt and disallowed access to the entire site.

(2) I went to Google's Page Remove tool and asked the page to be removed. I got a successful response saying that the page was in fact removed. The status is now set to "removed."

...and yet the page still appears in Google search results. Any idea why? I guess I could always rename the host to `someOTHERrandomString.myDomain.com' but I'd like to know why Google Webmaster tools show the page as "Removed" as of April 3 but it's still highly ranked on the search engine page.

According to Google: "We won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there is an active URL removal request for the page." I've done both of those things, and again, there are no external sites linking to the custom hostname.

So what's up?

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