Speed up the process of removing URLs from Google Index

[sssrpm]

Hi guys,

We have done some work to try to remove pages from Google index. We have done the following:

1. Noindex tag

2. Make pages returning a 404 response.

Is there anyway to notify Google about these changes so we can speed up the process of removing these pages from Google index?

Also regarding the URL removal tool, Google says that it's used to remove URLs from search results, does it mean the URLs are removed from their index too?

Many thanks guys

David

[Naghirniac]

Unfortunately I don't know any way to inform google. What i think you should do is to change the sitemap and also include this page at your robots.txt file.

[cmdsonline]

I would resubmit your sitemap after you've removed the page. Time will make it go away.

[KeriMorgret]

Do the pages have things like credit card or social security numbers where you need them out of the SERPs right away, or is it just stuff you want gone for some other reason? There is a URL removal tool you can use, but Google does prefer it to be used for things that have to be gone immediately, and to do what you're doing now for the rest of the items.

My personal experience (from a while back) is that when a robots.txt changed and unblocked items from being crawled, they were back in the SERPs right away. Google seems to still know about all of these URLs (and doesn't just wipe them from memory entirely) even if they don't show them in the search results. I don't have any resources to point you to on that right now though.