How Do You Handle Deleted Content?

[Encrypted]

Hey guys ,

I was going through one of my old websites and discovered a lot of articles that were over optimized and no longer of importance. I deleted them (over 70 articles) and used G.console to manually remove the URLs from search.

Did i miss anything? i'm i supposed to do some sort of redirect?

I'm trying to achieve 2 things here :

1) Remove the URLs completely from search.

2) Ensure Google does not crawl or add them to index again.

I'll appreciate your contributions.

 

[ryandiscord]

All you have to do is delete them. They'll eventually drop from the index. You can redirect them if there is a relevant replacement for it. If not Google will consider it a soft 404.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Requesting the URLs to be removed from the SERPs is not the same as deindexing them. It just makes it so Google users won't find them. For them to be truly removed, they need to show a 404, 301, or meta noindex tag to Google's crawler.

The problem here is that when you delete them you likely delete them from your sitemap too, meaning Google is going to take forever to recrawl them again out of their index repository.

I'm in the same boat at the moment. The new Search Console "Coverage Report" dashboard will show you which URLs still remain. You can request "validation" in some of these panels, but otherwise you can request Google fetch the page again, which should do the job. If not, you can fetch and submit for indexation again on the original Search Console.

If you want to speed it along, you need to get Google to recrawl those URLs and see the 404's, etc. I'm sure there's other tricks we could do to make that happen, but the above method is the one that's provided by Google, versus making social signals or links or creating web 2.0's with a list of links and getting it crawled, etc.

 

[Stephen]

You can also look into doing a 410 status on the content pages you want Google to de-index. It works quite well on the sites I've used it on where we have a lot of dynamic content, think jobs board sites and large marketplace type sites.

 

[beerhead]

I deleted them (over 70 articles) and used G.console to manually remove the URLs from search.

Mind that if there're any backlinks pointing to the deleted pages, they'll keep popping up in search console as 404s.