What is the Removals tool?

The three tabs

Temporary removals is the one site owners use. A new request offers two options:

• Temporarily remove URL hides the address from results for about six months and clears its stored copy and snippet.
• Clear cached URL keeps the page in results but wipes the stored snippet until Google crawls it again. This is for a page that still exists but used to contain something that has since been removed.

You can submit one exact URL or tick Remove all URLs with this prefix to cover a whole folder.

Outdated content lists requests made by members of the public through Google's separate outdated-content tool, for pages on your site whose results no longer match the live page. You can see them here. You do not create them.

SafeSearch filtering lists pages on your site that users have reported as adult content.

What a temporary removal does and does not do

• It applies to Google Search only. The page stays live, and other search engines are unaffected.
• It covers the URL variants too: http and https, with and without www.
• It does not stop crawling. Google may still fetch the page while it is hidden.
• When it expires, the URL can reappear if it is still live and indexable.
• You can cancel a request at any time from the same screen.

Requests are usually processed within about a day. Each shows a status: processing, temporarily removed, denied, cancelled or expired.

Making the removal permanent

Within the six months, do one of these on the site:

1. Delete the page so it returns 404 or 410.
2. Add noindex and keep the page crawlable so Google can see the tag.
3. Put it behind a login.

Blocking the URL in robots.txt is not on that list. A disallowed URL can stay indexed, because Google cannot read a noindex on a page it may not fetch, and it may list the bare address if other pages link to it.

If the content moved, use a 301 redirect instead. Nothing needs removing.

When not to use it

• To fix duplicates or choose a canonical. A removal hides every version of the URL. Use canonical tags and redirects.
• To clean out old pages after a redesign. Let 404s and redirects do their work. Google drops dead URLs by itself.
• To deal with a hacked site's spam pages one at a time. Clean the site so those URLs return 404, and use a prefix removal only if they share a folder.
• For someone else's site. The tool only works on properties you have verified. For pages you do not control, Google offers public request forms for outdated content and for personal or legal matters.

A WordPress example

Suppose a draft price list was published by mistake at /internal-prices/. Move it to the bin or set it private so the address returns 404, submit a temporary removal for the exact URL, and if a file was attached, request removal of its /wp-content/uploads/ address too, since media files have URLs of their own. If the page must stay up without being listed, set it to noindex instead; our guide to noindexing a page in WordPress shows where. Then confirm with the URL Inspection tool that Google sees the new state.