How long before my name disappears from Google

[frank555]

Hi

My name was included on a webpage in contravention to company privacy policy.

I got them to remove my name from the webpage and the page was crawled a day later. My name does not appear neither on the webpage or on the cached version. This happened last week.

A google search on my name did not point to that page for a day or two but when i googled my name again today it did point to that page again.

My question is, is this an indexing issue and will my name be forever indexed to that page even though it no longer appears on that page.

If not, what is a reasonable period of time to expect that my name will not point to that page.

The site has quite a bit of traffic so it gets crawled every couple of days.

Thank you

[tedster]

Hello Frank555, and we,come to the forums.

This certainly could be a temporary issue that comes from Google's need to coordinate large data sets. If that's all it is, then it should clear up with a few more days.

However, sometimes a past version of a url does get stored in what Google used to call the Supplemental Undex, which stores a URL plus a cache date. If that's the case, then a week's wait won't clear it up.

The way I'd address the issue at that point is to change the URL of the current page (also change any links that point to it.) Then delete the old url and use Google's URL Removal Tool to take the old URL out of the index permanently.

[frank555]

thanks

Thats whats bizarre. The cached version with the search result does not have my name in it.

I did a search on google

site:www.thesitename.com/pagename/

and my page did not come up as a supplemental result, so i'm kinda hopeful.

Thanks your help

[frank555]

my name is now appearing as

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page

any idea if those stay forever ?

[janharders]

well, if there are still links which point to that site and contain your name in the link-text, they would. check out, if that's the case.

[frank555]

how do I find the links ?

[Receptional Andy]

how do I find the links ?

There probably aren't any links - "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page " is somewhat misleading in many cases: it's added whenever the cache highlighting doesn't find the words on the page, but the keyword-highlighting function is basic, and does not account for many other situations when the words don't match (e.g. if you search with advanced operators, or Google does clever word-matching for your query).

What I believe you're seeing is an updated cache, but not an updated index. So, you can locate the page searching for your name since the index still returns it as a match. If you wait, this should correct itself when the words indexed for the page is updated. I see this sort of effect pretty commonly.

[frank555]

thanks Andy,

thats what I thought so too. Any idea what kind of timeframe we're talking about before the index gets updated ?

[Receptional Andy]

Hard to say unfortunately, and as tedsterimplied, some of the indexes hang around pretty much forever. The more good links into the page, the quicker you're likely to see changes. If the page gets re-spidered frequently, you're likely to see 'default' results update within a few days to a week. You may find that various ways of constructing queries will still be able to retrieve the older version for some time.

The ideal would be to ditch the old page entirely (via explicit removal) and change the URL as tedster suggested. You could always wait a week or two and see if you were happy with the results - if not, go for removal.

[frank555]

thanks...the site is a frequently visited newspaper so I might be lucky about that, but I doubt i can get them to delete the page,