Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Myself, I've lost a root URL in one site while trying to remove www and no-www duplicate. But it was almost six months ago. It will be six months next week.
And I can expect the site back a week later - because I just noticed some earlier removed URLs marked as expired.
More precisely, all URLs removed six months and one week ago are marked as expired, while all other are still marked as complete as they used to.
I write this, because I want to share with members waiting for their accidentally removed sites to be back, that six months period appears to work, in the contrary to "90 days" we believed before.
I removed a site from google back in Novemember and am still waiting for its return.
Are you saying that after 6 months it could return? because I emailed google back in Feburary and they told me it would be 3 months and then failed to reply to any of my follow up messages when the site remained out of their index after the three month period passed.
Also what do you mean by marked as expired?
Any advice would really be appreciated here, I am going nuts about this.
After 90 days I emailed Google, and they told me about 90 days, so I emailed again saying that 90 days had passed, they sent another automatic response, but a few weeks later WebmasterWorld members noticed that information in URL Console started to say 'six moths' instead of 90 days.
Yesterday, I noticed my URLs removed on 5.11.2004 marked as expired instead of complete - I mean, in URL Console you can select 'show all requests' and see all pages you ever removed, with status either pending, complete or expired.
I don't care to check if these already expired removal URL entries can be reincluded in the index, because they are meant to stay out of the index, but after about two weeks my main URL will likely get expired status and then I'll know if it's reincluded or not - it's spidered at least daily all these six months and some PR checkers show it's PR, and it raised after last toolbar update, so I expect it to be back soon.
I think your page will also get back, but when - it depends on what exact day you removed it.
Yesterday I've remove, with the remove url console , about 4000 pages without title and descriptions on google serp.
The pages are topic*.html (*=1,2,3,4,5,6,7...)
Today, the url console says "COMPLETED".
Now I want to force google to re-indexing those pages and I've remove from my robots.txt " DISALLOW /topic "
What could I do now? Could I rename the old pages from "topic" to "topic-" to invited Google to index as a new pages or leave the pages with their old names?
Thank you
(sorry for my english)
Adding a hyphen will work, however I'm sure you can figure out something better to change in it - you could add a keyword eventually.
Bye Tintin
For one day, a few removed pages, which don't exists for over six months (404), appeared in "site:" results with snippets, but now they disappeared.
But there are two URLs that still show complete even if they have been removed on 9.11.2004.
Accidentally removed on 19.11.2004, when I attempted to remove www.site.xx and lost both www and non-www, now has expired in URL Console and shows in site: search with snippet and fresh tag. Cache and tPR still can't be seen, but it's likely to be datacenters issue. R...brick tool shows the same PR it gained in tPR update last month (it was removed, but still PR tools showed PR and PR was passed!).
I'm so happy, thank you Google!
P.S. My other removed sites are also back and already with PR, so it's certain it's going to be back.
Hurray.
Well spotted wizard.
Maybe then my homepage will be back and I'll have recovered from an overdose of Bourbon update too!
There is another problem with expiring URL removal - Google system doesn't check if expired pages still exist, and now I have many 404 pages listed and I have to remove them in URL Console again. I don't like doing it every six months, so I hope Google Team will do something with this. They should just crawl expired page and don't reinclude it if it returns 404!
mydomain.com/
mydomain.com/index.htm
And created a new homepage mydomain.com/index.html
This didn't work even though the index.html has a PR and shows the normal backlinks from the toolbar. There is no cache and is not searchable in the G index.
The end of Site: command list always show #*$! of xxx+1 pages and I believe the +1 page is the homepage which they won't show.
Apparently no one can damage your website except yourself with G's help, lack of support and arbitrary ill-defined rules and instructions. Thanks again G.
There used to be a bug, that you could remove competitor's site removing their site.com/index.html IF they had no index.html (but index.php or default.asp instead). One WW member exploited it to remove microsoft.com and adobe.com, and then Google repaired the bug in a few days, but it still treats these three URLs as one so if you remove any of them, you're out of all.
May I ask is it possible to ask Google for help to reduce this 180 days period? Since I accidently removed all pages of a site (I was trying to remove all pages without www only).
Thanks.
If those three are treated the same then why does my domain.com/index.html have PR and backlinks (no cache) whereas domain.com/ has neither?
GoogleGuy,
Sure would be nice to be able to get out of this 180 day hold. I appears to be killing my entire site in terms of search rankings.
If those three are treated the same then why does my domain.com/index.html have PR and backlinks (no cache) whereas domain.com/ has neither?
It's perhaps removal from the index doesn't mean removing from links database used in PR calculations. I have told it before in other thread, but I'll repeat it:
Page removed from Google index with URL console can still have PR, and pass it to pages it links to!
You may find arguments against it, but it was the case with my page! First, it shown no PR. After a few months page.#*$!.yy/index.html shown PR in some PR checking tools. Then, after some time page.#*$!.yy started showing PR while /index.html didn't show it anymore. When the last toolbar update took place, this PR has raised, and when the page finally came back to index, it started to show this PR value in the toolbar.
Removal with URL console doesn't actually means removing it from the index, it's just it's not shown in SERPS, but can be still crawled, links can be followed, and it can have PR and be cached (even if this cache is not shown anywhere).
And these pages which I deliberately removed six months ago, returning 404 ever since then, and reappearing right now in SERPS with old snippets - are additional proof that removed pages are just not shown but forgotten.
Almost 6 months ago, I removed 2 sites that were under development and got crawled and indexed as URL only listings (I was bad and didn't have a robots.txt file, since there weren't any links to the sites - I suspect the toolbar phoning home, but that's different matter). I don't remember seeing any time limit. One of the sites went live in 2/05 and I watched googlebot come and crawl again and again. I kept wondering why I wasn't getting listed. Then I remembered the URL removal and when I went to check, I saw the 6 months and freaked a bit. I swear it wasn't there before, but I might have forgotten it if it just said 90 days.
My 6 months is up on 6/4. ;-)
I have learned how to get some traffic without Google though and that's a valuable lesson to learn.
martin
Six months ago the removal pages didn't say anything about the six month temporary removal period, correct? Did it say 90 days back then?
Yes, when I removed it in November 2004, it had been written 90 days.
In February, after 90 days, I e-mailed Google twice describing the situation: first - that it's over 90 days and site is not back, second - that I removed www version and lost both www and no-www.
Google gave me two automated responses, as they usually do, but a few weeks later they changed 90 days to six months on URL Console page, and they changed status information so it started to show both www and no-www pending if you submit one of them to removal, so obviously they took some more care about these issues.
There is no doubt we would like better solutions from Google, including possibility to cancel removal of each removed URL in Console, but they must have their reasons to not implement it right now - in the beginning of this year Google fought hard with spam in the results, for example, and they have to follow their priorites.
I wish I had been able to reinclude my site earlier, but I dare to think my emails at least called engineers
attention that some things could be improved in URL Console eventually, now my site is back and I just keep trying to make other aware of problems with careless using of URL removal tool.
In my experience of web developer it would be easier to implement new features in URL Console than bother with individual reinclusion requests, but my experience has nothing to do with Google immense scale.
If it's a single site with one removal, you can try writing to user support and asking them to pass the request on to GoogleGuy.
Hi GoogleGuy,
Thanks a lot. Just the reply itself is very encouraging. For my case, it is a single site with one removal. (I have used the removal tool many times, but all others worked as I expected).
I did asked for help from this page:
[google.com...]
but only get an automated response.
I will try again as you instructed.
I've uploaded my robots.txt file to google's automatic url removal proceedure (is this what's referred to as Google Console?). All that dross which google should have but have never removed is now removed from my google searches.
Am I to understand correctly that they haven't been removed from their index at all but have only been removed from the SERPS? This is only temporary and all that dross will return to the SERPS in 6 months 6 days time?
Jeez. How do we ever get all this old dross out of their index. The pages don't even exist any more. Do we have to clutter-up our robots.txt and .htaccess file with this stuff forever and resubmit robots.txt to google every six months. That's ridiculous.
If you don't want some contents spidered or a link to it in a search engine, make sure that is requires the user to login to get to the content, if it is publicly accessible, sooner or later there is the chance that it will come accross a link to it otherwise.
