: Discreetly remove page from Google index without modifying page HTML Let's just say a "friend" wants to do a guest blog on your site with a link to their site, but you aren't very happy about

@BetL925

Google's remove URL tool allows you to hide your page from the Google search results for 90 days. This method would leave no visible trace on your site. The only way your friend would know is if they tried to search for the page in Google and couldn't find it.

After 90 days, you would need to make another removal request. Google doesn't pass Pagerank through non-indexed pages, so this method might also prevent the link from counting. However, it isn't clear that the page isn't really indexed, as opposed to indexed but hidden from the search results.

A second method would be to use robots.txt. If you put Disallow: /the-page-to-be-removed.html in your robots.txt file Google wouldn't be able to crawl it or pass link juice from it. It might index the page if it got external links, but it wouldn't include any of the keywords on the page itself in the index. Your friend could check your robots.txt file if they wanted to. If you wanted to make it more discreet you could disguise the Disallow with wildcards: Disallow: /*-to-be-*

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@Eichhorn148

Beside of ethical aspect: yes, it is possible. Let the link be dofollow in the page source code, but send nofollow with X-Robots-Tag, like:

<FilesMatch "page.html$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "nofollow"
</FilesMatch>


Googlebot reads the X-Robots-Tag earlier then the source code and, despite conflicting signals about this link, it would (hopefully and according to its behavioral logic) follow the signal it got earlier.

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