Every now and again, I find it interesting to Google random things. Sometimes it's my own name, sometimes it's something I was always meaning to look up, and sometimes it's to see what is said about a website I've designed.
Well, I recently decided to Google the Cole Harbour C@P Site's page, coleharbourcap.ca, and was quite surprised at the results. In short, 155 pages, most of them now invalid, with the useful results hidden in amongst these other pages.
If you are interested in doing the same thing, I would recommend using the "site:" operator, for example "site:coleharbourcap.ca", in order to show exclusively pages from our website. I wished to remove these references, in order to provide more accurate results to the users who may be searching us up on Google. It was not, unfortunately, as easy as one would expect to remove a page from Google searches. If this is something you need done, whether it be because of an old page, or one that contains information you would rather not be indexed, here is a quick bit of information to check out:
- Enable Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is a great service offered by Google to offer statistics about your website. It is simple to set up, and even if you don't need to edit search results, it is worthwhile to have in order to see exactly what the Google crawler sees. It can also provide you with how many clicks you get from its searches, and what the search terms used are.
- Edit (and maybe create) the robots.txt file
The easiest way to make a page eligible for removal is by editing the robots.txt file in the root of your website (or ask your webmaster to do so), and add entries in the format "Disallow: /yourpage.html". Google will also consider pages which return 404 errors (page not found) as eligible for removal.
- Submit a request for removal
In Google Webmaster Tools, click on Site Configuration, and Crawler Access. Then click on the Remove URL tab, and enter the appropriate information. Here you can also see your previous requests to see if they were approved or denied.
- Wait!
It will take a few days for the removal to go through, so just wait!
Hopefully you can make use of this, in order to improve the results for your webpage, and even improve the position you are in the search results. Good luck!
