Removals Tool

The Removals tool enables you to temporarily block pages from Google Search results on sites that you own, see a history of removal requests from both property owners and non-owners, and also to see any URLs on your site that were reported as containing adult content.

Temporarily block URLs on your site

Follow this procedure to temporarily block a URL on your site from appearing in Google Search results.

When to use this tool

• You have a URL on a Search Console property that you own, and you need to take it off Google Search quickly. You must take additional steps to remove the URL permanently. The URL to remove can be for a web page or an image.
• You’ve updated the page to remove sensitive content, and want Google to reflect the change in Search results.

When not to use this tool

• To block a page on a property that you don’t own. See If you don’t control the page.
• To permanently remove a URL from Search. Use the Removals tool as part of this process to remove a URL permanently. This tool is just one step in the process.
• To remove content from the internet. This tool removes content only from Google Search.
• To remove results from other search engines. This tool removes content only from Google Search.
• To clean up cruft, like old pages that 404. If you recently changed your site and now have some outdated URLs in the index, Google’s crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results. There’s no need to request an urgent update.
• To address crawl errors from your Search Console account. The blocking tool blocks URLs from Google’s search results, not from your Search Console account. You don’t need to manually remove URLs from this report; they will drop out naturally over time.
• To “start from scratch” with your site. If you’re worried that your site might have a manual action, or you want to start with a clean slate after purchasing a domain from someone else, we recommend filing a reconsideration request letting us know what you’re worried about and what has changed.
• To take your site “offline” after being hacked. If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, use the URL blocking tool to block any new URLs that the hacker created—for example, http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don’t recommend blocking your entire site, or blocking URLs that you’ll eventually want indexed. Instead, clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site. More information about dealing with a hacked site.
• To get the right “version” of your site indexed. Many sites make the same HTML content or files available via different URLs. If you do this, and don’t want duplicates to appear in search results, review our recommended methods of canonicalization. Don’t use the URL tool to block the URLs you don’t want in search results. It won’t keep your favorite version of a page; instead, could remove all versions (http/https and www/non-www) of a URL.

Block a URL

To temporarily block a URL from Google Search, or update Google’s view when a page has changed:

1. The URL must be in a Search Console property that you own. If it’s not, follow these instructions instead.
2. Open the Removals tool.
3. Select the Temporary Removals tab.
4. Click New Request.
5. Select either Temporarily remove URL or Clear cached URL:
   • Temporarily remove URL
   • Clear cached URL
6. Select Next to complete the process. The request usually takes up to a day to process, and is not guaranteed to be accepted. Check back to see the status of the request. If your request has been denied, click Learn more to learn why.
7. Submit additional removal requests for any additional URLs that might point to the same page, as well as any variations in URL casing that your server handles. For example, all the following URLs might point to the same page:
   • example.com/mypage
   • example.com/MyPage
   • example.com/page?1234
8. To make your removal permanent, read the next sections.

Find the correct URL for blocking

Here’s how to find the correct URL to submit to the tool in order to block it in Search results.

For a page, you must enter the exact URL that appears in Google Search results. Small variations in URLs—such as www.example.com/dragon vs. www.example.com/Dragon—are two different URLs. In order for Google to remove the content you want, you must enter the exact URL that you found in Google Search results.

To find the correct URL:

1. Visit the page and copy the URL in your browser URL bar.

Find any additional URLs for the same page: It’s common for the same content to appear in multiple URLs. For example, all the following blog post URLs all point to the same page:
http://www.example.com/forum/thread/123

http://www.example.com/forum/post/456

http://www.example.com/forum/thread/123?post=456

http://www.example.com/forum/thread/123?post=456&sessionid=12837460

2. 
   Even if you successfully request removal of one URL, if the content you’re trying to remove appears in our search results under other URLs, it can still appear. If this is the case, submit additional removal requests, one for each URL that displays this content.

Here’s how to find the URL of an image to temporarily block that image:

1. Find the image on Google Images using Google Chrome browser.
2. Right-click the image and select Copy Link Address. Do not left-click the image first. (The URL should be something like this: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https….)
3. Paste the URL into a file or document, so it’s available when you use the URL removal tool.
4. Find any additional URLs for the same image; an image can be hosted at multiple URLs on the same site, or on different sites. To find additional copies of an image:
   • Right-click an image in search results and choose Search Google for Image
   • Click Find other sizes of this image: All sizes to get a page with all sizes
   • Also browse “Pages that include matching images” on the bottom of the results page.

Cancel a request

If you want to cancel your temporary block from search results:

1. Open the Removals tool.
2. Find your request in the history table.
3. Click the menu button next to the request and select Cancel request.

To review full instructions on Removal Tool from Google follow the link below:

Removals Tool – Search Console Help

Non-emergency image removal from the Google’s search results

To prevent images from your site appearing in Google’s search results, add a robots.txt file to the root of the server that blocks the image. While it takes longer to remove an image from search results than it does to use the Removals tool, it gives you more flexibility and control through the use of wildcards or subpath blocking. It also applies to all search engines, whereas the Remove URLs tool only applies to Google.

For example, if you want Google to exclude the dogs.jpg image that appears on your site at www.yoursite.com/images/dogs.jpg, add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg

The next time Google crawls your site, we’ll see this directive and drop your image from our search results.

To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

Additionally, disallow patterns may include “*” to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in “$” to indicate the end of a name. To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg but not .gif images), you’d use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /*.gif$

By specifying Googlebot-Image as the User-agent, the images will be excluded from Google Images. If you would like to exclude the images from all Google searches (including Google Web Search and Google Images), specify the Googlebot user agent.