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A friend would like to get a particular page removed as quickly as possible from Yahoo. The page contains statements defamatory to his company, and comes up #2 in Yahoo (crawler based search) for his company name.
The organization that put up the page has agreed to take it down, but doesn't know how to get it removed from the Yahoo (and also the Google) index. I'm guessing that simply removing the page and letting Yahoo get a 404 might take a while.
One thought I've had is that the organization might instead change the content of the page, keeping the same url, and submit the url via Site Match to get it crawled in 48 hours.
Can this be done (I've never used Site Match), and will it work?
Or... is there any other quick way of getting rid of a page?
...However you could also ask them to mod_rewrite the URL to somewhere else or block yahoo in their robots.txt for that particular page
The issue isn't blocking Yahoo from spidering existing content. All the problematic content is on a single page, and that page can be entirely removed or changed.
The issue is updating Yahoo's index and getting the old data overwritten as quickly as possible. What's faster...
- dropping the page and free submitting to get a 404...
- changing the content but keeping the page and submitting the page to Site Match?
Can you just submit one page to Site Match? Its only function would be to overwrite the old data. Would they let you submit a page that just said "page content deleted"?
Span - Thank you as well. It's not my site, and I would bet that the organization whose site it is doesn't have a webmaster capable of setting up a 410, but I'm filing the thought away for reference. Just found this recent thread on the subject of 404/410s, possibly of interest...
Should I use 404 or 410 for GONE for HTTP 1.0 search spiders?
[webmasterworld.com...]
