by Megan Homan

Getting a page to rank well in Google takes time, as does getting a page removed from Google. The steps you must take to get a web page removed, blocked or redirected are very easy; however, you must be patient as you wait for it to be officially gone from the search results. To remove a particular web page you must make the necessary changes to your website and then wait for the Google spiders to crawl it in anticipation that the page is no longer in the index.

Among Google’s Webmaster Tools you will discover a URL Removal Tool that will help expedite the process, but only if you are looking to remove a web page permanently. This delete URL tool will help in weeding out unwanted web pages, content and images –basically stuff you no longer have use for – and will have little to no impact on your SEO tactics.

If you don’t have access to your server, preventing a search engine from indexing your page can be accomplished through simple coding. The execution of a noindex meta tag will tell the web crawlers not to index the page and will inevitably stop the page from appearing in the search results. The following code will stop the crawlers in their tracks: < meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” >. Adding this tag will not provide a quick fix, nor will the page automatically disappear. As mentioned above, you will have to wait for the page with the noindex tag to be visited before the URL gets removed from the results.

Another option for making a page disappear from search results is to use a 301 redirect. This method of removing URLs should be used if the page is or was an important part of your site, especially if it has link power that you don’t want to lose. When the web crawlers visit that particular page, they will be redirected to its replacement and the original version will eventually be dropped from the index.