Delisting: How I Got the Search Engines to Remove Results

Delisting. Not something that most people try to do with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Usually, we are trying to get the most prominent result spossible with the most competititve keywords available. It’s a juggling game really. But what happens when reality demands getting delisted or at least partially delisted.

The reality came recently as it affected my church’s website. For the same reason I delisted, I won’t get overly specific about the request. Essentially, we have American missionaries who work within communist China and though we had attempted to be intentionally vague about their identity, they had requested that information pertaining to their work be completely removed from the site. OF course we agreed but removing the data from the site was the easy part. More difficult was removing search engine cached data.

Search Engine Policies

Google Policy on Removing Cached Pages (link)

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.

Yahoo Policy on Removing Cached Pages (link)

As our index contains billions of web pages we cannot manually make changes to the index and rely on our automated crawl systems to update the search index. If you want the status of pages that have been crawled and indexed to change, you will need to make changes to the site content or control documents that communicate to our crawler how these pages should be handled by the search engine. When changes are made to a web page, those changes will be properly reflected in our database the next time the page is crawled, indexed, and the index-update cycle is complete.

MSN Policy on Removing Cached Pages seemed to be non-existent. It was more globally about allowing or disallowing the MSN robot to index a site or not and MSN seemed pretty ambivelent to cache copies altogether.

Getting Cached Results Removed

Google seemed to be the most proactive in their reaching out to site owners about cache copies. They provide a readily accessible form to submit the request. Yahoo seemed to really hammer on the fact that manual search manipulation would not happen in any way, shape or form. MSN seemed to just ignore cutomers talking to them. I questioned how successful I would be but I went ahead and wrote the letter anyway:

I am the admin for [link removed], my church’s website. It has come to my attention from missionaries serving in Communist China and other closed areas of southeast Asia that some info we have had up needed to be removed to protect the identities of the individuals and families involved. As you know, communist China is not open to Christianity or proselytizing and the safety of the individuals involved is very high priority. I have changed the content of the page in question and it is safe for further indexing, however, I NEED to have the cached copies of the page ([link removed]) removed from {Search Engine}’s index.

I was actually very surprised that all three companies readily complied and within 72 hours, all cached content was removed. I guess the bottom line is communicating to the big guys is important and can get results if properly presented.