How do I know if google have removed my site completed

[edward-may]

Hi guys

Just a check up really, I submitted my site to google web master tools for removal, but I can see my developer has not managed to take the site down at all.  I can see when i search site:domainname that none of the pages are showing up as indexed does this mean that google have removed it completely? If so, can I delete my entry within google web master tools?

Also, I noticed I had not been receiving sufficient information to my 3 top level domains it appears because i didn't add the https status.  I have since updated them all to https status, so can I now just go ahead and deleted the other sites within GWT?

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hey Justin,

Submitting your site to GWMT for removal will not remove the site completely from Google's index, especially if your developer has left your entire site live on the internet.

Indeed, there are thousands, likely millions (probably more!) of sites on the internet that do not have Google WMT installed.

When your site is taken offline, it will still take some time for Google to realise this, try to re-index, then drop it from its index.

Hence I'm not sure why a site:yourdomainname search reverts to showing zero pages (as it's still live), unless nofollow / noindex has been blanket installed across your site. In this scenario, your home page would still show (as it's still live).

Re domains that haven't been added that use HTTPS, I would keep the HTTP domains within GWMT, so that you "own" the ability to check / monitor them if ever a problem arises. Deleting them from GWMT means you have no "ownership". This other Q&A post discusses this subject (amongst others).

Hope this helps?

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

If you have removed the site from the index, but it is still available for bots to visits, it's quite possible that it's getting indexed again:

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?rd=1:

"Important**:** To ensure your content is permanently removed, you need to do one of the following within 90 days of requesting removal. Otherwise, your content may later reappear in search results. (More information about blocking Google.)

• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. Non-HTML file (like PDFs) should be completely removed from your server.
• If the page still exists, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, we won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there is an active URL removal request for the page."

So I would keep the webmastertools active until the site has completely taken offline (or completely blocked with robots.txt)

For the other sites - I personally would keep the non-https version for a while, but if all pages are properly redirected to https it's not really necessary to keep them.

rgds,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Excellent! Thanks a bunch Tony!

[edward-may]

Awesome, thanks again for your clear directions Dirk!