At the end of January Google announced the launch of a new version of the Removals report in Search Console. The report allows site owners to temporarily hide a page from appearing in Google Search results and it now also provides info on the site’s pages that have been reported via other Google public tools.
The Removals tool gives SEOs, website marketers and others the opportunity to remove content from Google search which may no longer be required from the site, but it will also indicate why some content was removed due to third-party requests. This will allow users to control the information that Google indexes, but also take action to try to unblock content removal requests including those made by third-party requests due to outdated content or SafeSearch filtering.
The tool can be accessed in Search Console under the menu of Index tools and reports. There are different tools available to report and remove information from Google, but this blog focuses on three areas that will be part of the new Search Console report: temporary removals, outdated content and SafeSearch filtering requests.
Temporary removals
A temporary removal request is a way to quickly remove specific content on your site from Google Search results. A successful request lasts about six months, which should be enough for the Webmaster to find a permanent solution.
There are two types of requests available:
- Temporary remove URL will hide the URL from Google Search results for about six months and clear the cached copy of the page.
- Clear cache URL clears the cached page and wipes out the page description snippet in Search results until the page is crawled again.
Outdated content
The outdated content section provides information on removal requests made through the public Remove Outdated Content tool, which can be used by anyone (not just site owners) to update search results showing information that is no longer present on a page.
SafeSearch filtering
The SafeSearch filtering section in Search Console shows a history of pages on your site that were reported by Google users as adult content using the SafeSearch Suggestion tool. URLs submitted using this tool are reviewed, and if Google feels that this content should be filtered from SafeSearch results, these URLs are tagged as adult content.
If you’d like to know more about this tool, or how to best use Search Console for your website, please contact us for details.