Brandon Mercer, who works at Hearst Newspapers, posted within the Google Search Console assist boards that individuals are utilizing the “take away outdated content material device” from Google to take away competitor pages, and he mentioned it really works. Though Google’s Danny Sullivan responded, he appears unconvinced that it does certainly work. The device was launched in January 2020 and was upgraded a number of months later.
The device will allow you to submit requests for pages that present a major quantity of content material that was modified from the unique story. However Google’s assist doc says, “If the web page continues to be out there however modified, it’s going to take away the snippet and cached outcome from Search outcomes, however each shall be refreshed the following time Google’s crawler visits the web page. Till that point, the web page can nonetheless seem in Search outcomes.” It shouldn’t take away the web page and de-index the web page utterly.
Brandon wrote, “The “Take away Outdated Content material” device can be utilized to deindex a information article, together with a competitor’s article, with none enter from the location proprietor. The device solely requires customers to indicate one phrase that’s within the outdated article however not within the new one. After a person submits that, Google de-indexes the article unilaterally inside hours. I’ve verified this myself and seen that it really works. The one strategy to uncover that somebody did this to your web site is to go to your Search Console and examine for eliminated pages.”
He then later mentioned, “that is taking place to many publishers. There may be NO approval course of on the webmaster facet. And, I simply verified it once more yesterday. You’ll be able to take away ANY URL from indexing, unilaterally. For my colleague, she did not even have so as to add any outdated phrases. She simply submits it, and it de-indexes. This can be a main bug.”
So Danny Sullivan from Google got here in and wrote, “I will cross this on,” he added “however your screenshots aren’t clear. In a single, you present that an outdated cache elimination occurred. That is not the identical as a web page truly being eliminated. The device does enable for a cache / snippet to be eliminated if it is now not reflecting stay content material. And in case you are discovering a phrase that now not seems, sure, that would set off a cache/snippet elimination in that case.”
Danny then reiterated that “for truly eradicating a web page, the device actually should not course of a elimination if the web page itself continues to be be reported as stay and never blocked to us. Within the instances you have examined, you are discovering that the web page is certainly nonetheless stay and there are not any blocking mechanisms on it resembling a noindex attribute?”
“The device is designed to take away hyperlinks which can be now not stay or snippets which can be now not reflecting stay content material. We’ll look into this additional,” Danny mentioned yesterday.
So I’m not certain what’s going on, have any of you tried this out?
Here’s what the device seems to be like:
Discussion board dialogue at Google Search Console Assist Boards.
