Remove Content from Google's Index

Need to remove content from Google's index?

Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. We're committed to providing thorough and unbiased search results for our users; therefore, we cannot participate in the practice of censorship. We stop indexing pages of a site only at the request of the webmaster who's responsible for those pages, when it's spamming our index, or as required by law. This policy is necessary to ensure that pages aren't inappropriately removed from our index.

Removal options

Please select an option below for instructions. Removals will take effect the next time Google crawls your site.

Remove your entire website
Remove part of your website
Remove snippets
Remove cached pages
Remove an outdated ("dead") link
Remove an image from Google's Image Search

Remove your entire website

If you wish to exclude your entire website from Google's index, you can place a file at the root of your server called robots.txt. This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html. Please note that Googlebot does not interpret a 401/403 response ("Unauthorized"/"Forbidden") to a robots.txt fetch as a request not to crawl any pages on the site.

To remove your site from search engines and prevent all robots from crawling it in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /

Each port must have its own robots.txt file. In particular, if you serve content via both http and https, you'll need a separate robots.txt file for each of these protocols. For example, to allow Googlebot to index all http pages but no https pages, you'd use the robots.txt files below.

For your http protocol (http://yourserver.com/robots.txt):

User-agent: * Allow: /

For the https protocol (https://yourserver.com/robots.txt):

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Google will continue to exclude your site or directories from successive crawls if the robots.txt file exists in the web server root. If you do not have access to the root level of your server, you may place a robots.txt file at the same level as the files you want to remove. Doing this and submitting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 180 day removal of your site from the Google index, regardless of whether you remove the robots.txt file after processing your request. Doing this and submitting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 180 day removal of the directories specified in your robots.txt file from the Google index, regardless of whether you remove the robots.txt file after processing your request. (Keeping the robots.txt file at the same level would require you to return to the URL removal system every 180 days to reissue the removal.)

Remove part of your website

Option 1: Robots.txt

To remove directories or individual pages of your website, you can place a robots.txt file at the root of your server. For information on how to create a robots.txt file, see the The Robot Exclusion Standard. When creating your robots.txt file, please keep the following in mind: When deciding which pages to crawl on a particular host, Googlebot will obey the first record in the robots.txt file with a User-agent starting with "Googlebot." If no such entry exists, it will obey the first entry with a User-agent of "*". Additionally, Google has introduced increased flexibility to the robots.txt file standard through the use asterisks. Disallow patterns may include "*" to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in "$" to indicate the end of a name.

To remove all pages under a particular directory (for example, lemurs), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /lemurs

To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, .gif), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*.gif$

To remove dynamically generated pages, you'd use this robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*?

Option 2: Meta tags

Another standard, which can be more convenient for page-by-page use, involves adding a <META> tag to an HTML page to tell robots not to index the page. This standard is described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#meta.

To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, you'd place the following meta tag into the <HEAD> section of your page:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

To allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Google's robots from indexing the page, you'd use the following tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

To allow robots to index the page on your site but instruct them not to follow outgoing links, you'd use the following tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

Note: If you believe your request is urgent and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, use our automatic URL removal system. In order for this automated process to work, the webmaster must first insert the appropriate meta tags into the page's HTML code. Doing this and submitting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 180-day removal of these pages from the Google index, regardless of whether you remove the robots.txt file or meta tags after processing your request.

Remove snippets

A snippet is a text excerpt that appears below a page's title in our search results and describes the content of the page..

To prevent Google from displaying snippets for your page, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Note: removing snippets also removes cached pages.

Remove cached pages

Google automatically takes a "snapshot" of each page it crawls and archives it. This "cached" version allows a webpage to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page's web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it, and we display a message at the top of the page to indicate that it's a cached version. Users can access the cached version by choosing the "Cached" link on the search results page.

To prevent all search engines from showing a "Cached" link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page::

Note: this tag only removes the "Cached" link for the page. Google will continue to index the page and display a snippet.

Google updates its entire index automatically on a regular basis. When we crawl the web, we find new pages, discard dead links, and update links automatically. Links that are outdated now will most likely "fade out" of our index during our next crawl.

To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html.