Removing Personal content from Google Index

[JoaoCJ]

Hi everyone,

A user is complaining that her name is appearing in google search through our job ads site, so I removed such ads through Search Console, but the problem is not the ads anymore but our internal search results.

The ads are no longer live but our searches has been indexed by google back then, We have been manually taking over 500 pages that included such name but more and more keep coming through pagination, we haven't found a pattern yet so pretty much any search result might have contained such name.

We might get some legal issues here, did you guys got into anything similar before?

We have just set some rules so that this doesn't happen again, but still can't find a way to deal with this one.

Thanks in advance.

PD: Not sure if this is the right category to fit it.

[Everett]

Hello JoaoCJ,

My recommendation is to not allow internal search result pages to be indexed. You should block them from being accessed via the Robots.txt file and then request their removal from GSC. This is what Google recommends.

There are always exceptions to the rule. However, best practices is all I can provide without knowing more about the situation, such as whether those internal search pages are an important part of your taxonomy (rare) or are also receiving significant, high quality organic search traffic (also rare).