Removing Text From A Web Page, And From Google's Index

[engine]

Removing Text From A Web Page, And From Google's Index [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

Change can happen—sometimes, as we saw in our previous post on URL removals, you may completely block or remove a page from your site. Other times you might only change parts of a page, or remove certain pieces of text. Depending on how frequently a page is being crawled, it can take some time before these changes get reflected in our search results. In this blog post we'll look at the steps you can take if we're still showing old, removed content in our search results, either in the form of a "snippet" or on the cached page that's linked to from the search result. Doing this makes sense when the old content contains sensitive information that needs to be removed quickly—it's not necessary to do this when you just update a website normally.

[tedster]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see anything new here. It's a kind of "how to" or Help article that summarizes existing options, but there's no way to remove just SOME text from the Google index. It's still all or nothing, right?

[TheMadScientist]

I think the following is the difference. (Emphasis Mine.)

If you have access to the website in question and have verified ownership of it in Google Webmaster Tools, you can use the URL removal tool there (under Site Configuration > Crawler access) to request that the snippet and the cached page be removed until the page has been re-crawled.

Yeah, the whole page is removed, but only until it's re-crawled. So it might only be gone for a day or two (or even an hour) depending on how often it's crawled, rather than the usual 6 months. This could be great for those times when you get an error page or something goofy indexed... Remove it until they get the working version again on the next run, instead of having people see 404 - Not Found or something as the page title.

[tedster]

Ah, thanks - I really just blew past that phrase. Yes, I've had situations where that would have been a help.

[TheMadScientist]

I really just blew past that phrase.

I probably would have missed it out too if you hadn't pointed out it looks the same, because when I first started reading it I thought it was, but figured I should actually pay attention rather than 'skimming as usual' so I could either find a difference or confirm it's the same thing... LOL