Google Improves Tool To Remove URLs From Third Party Website

[aakk9999]

Improving URL removals on third-party sites
December 18, 2013
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/improving-url-removals-on-third-party.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk]

Today we launched our improved public URL removal tool to make it easier to request updates based on changes on other people's websites. You can find it at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
This tool is useful for removals on other peoples' websites.

How to request a page be removed from search results
If the page itself was removed completely, you can request that it's removed from Google's search results. For this, it's important that the page returns the proper HTTP result code (403, 404, or 410), has a noindex robots meta tag, or is blocked by the robots.txt...

How to request a page's cache & snippet be removed from search results
If the page wasn't removed, you can also use this tool to let us know that a text on a page (such as a name) has been removed or changed. It'll remove the snippet & cached page in Google's search results...

[aakk9999]

This makes technical SEO aspect even more important, so that your site is not exposed to URL removal requests from the third party.

I cannot help but wonder what is the purpose behind this tool. Why asking webmasters to remove other people's pages that return 404 when Google can just drop these pages themselves so easily?

[Shepherd]

I've read through this a couple of times and I can't for the life of me figure out a legitimate purpose. Maybe they figure crowd sourcing updated page notification is going to be better/faster than their crawlers?

[Shepherd]

The devious side of me thinks that it sure could make a site seem popular if lots of people are notifying google when a page is updated...

[phranque]

this tool might be useful if you are trying to disavow links that GWT is reporting but the reported links are coming from pages which are now 4XX and google hasn't crawled them since they went 4XX.

[Shai]

Excellent point phranque.