How to remove unwanted URL from google cache

Question

We bought a new domain from HugeDomains.com before a month and made it live last week.

Before we move live, the advertisement published by HugeDomains.com got cached in search engines.

Now we need to remove that cached URL from all search engines.

Following is the Pattern of URL got cached, it's just a query string getting passed

http://www.example.com/?fp=ah1QKL6n%2FlECnlCZX2M7prGsvtbv8ddXendjKdEvTBtzHaEkYE%2BEk37MD1iDIPnimmKBVn7jZKj%2BPGqRUxNQzA%3D%3D&prvtof=ytNnOdijWVo6UL0CLJYkUNs043cNT%2BNtJQ5d5VD69Ac%3D&poru=RLg1S8TlJRc59ObVEdjqkbBOZjhk%2FIf%2BH8W1DtjVOk5VRbieT62uHl%2FGfuWk4d%2FnOfDQwYDvqLza3nG76SMxZA%3D%3D&

I have used Disallow in Robots.txt to remove that but its not working, following will be the code

Disallow: /*?fp=

Disallow: /?fp=ah1QKL6n%2FlECnlCZX2M7prGsvtbv8ddXendjKdEvTBtzHaEkYE%2BEk37MD1iDIPnimmKBVn7jZKj%2BPGqRUxNQzA%3D%3D&prvtof=ytNnOdijWVo6UL0CLJYkUNs043cNT%2BNtJQ5d5VD69Ac%3D&poru=RLg1S8TlJRc59ObVEdjqkbBOZjhk%2FIf%2BH8W1DtjVOk5VRbieT62uHl%2FGfuWk4d%2FnOfDQwYDvqLza3nG76SMxZA%3D%3D&

I even enabled a 302 Redirect for this query string fp= to my home page

Please let me know a way to resolve this.

Thanks in advance.

Joanvo · Answer 1 · 2015-02-04T14:00:21.447

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Robots.txt disallow should do it, but another good way is to return a 410 Gone result, then google will stop indexing it since it'll see this page has disappeared.

Edit

Looks like I was wrong about Robots.txt, but right about 410 Gone response: Reference

edited Feb 04 '15 at 14:00

answered Feb 04 '15 at 13:05

Joanvo

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Thanks Joanvo, Will look into this and get back to you. – Dinesh Babu Feb 04 '15 at 13:09

almost · Answer 2 · 2015-02-04T13:17:57.587

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I wouldn't do this with robots.txt.

Just wait. I think the most search engines will recognize that your website is new so they will crawl it again in near future.

Otherwise you can create a google-webmaster account and send your url to google to crawl it again.

EDIT: You're also able to disallow url-parameter in webmaster tools.

edited Feb 04 '15 at 13:17

answered Feb 04 '15 at 13:08

almost

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Hi @almost we already have a google-webmaster account and we have submitted all the pages for crawling and we even updated out sitemap too. – Dinesh Babu Feb 04 '15 at 13:11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 04 '15 at 18:26

You have to do a 301 permanent redirect for Google to drop old indexed page. If you do 302, Google will try to crawl that url once in a while as it is temporary. Ignoring query parameters does not help in clearing the cache, it just sends signal saying the url with query param is same as the one without it. I guess that is not what you want. My suggestion would be to do a 301 permanent redirect if you encounter query param fb.

Right now i doubt google handles 404 and 410 lot differently. So you can do a 410 as well.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 04 '20 at 11:50

Google webmaster can help you in removing outdated/ cache content from Google search results

Copy your domain Cached URL
Browse to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
Follow Request instructions.

The cache can be removed in a few numbers of hours. Google search engine crawls to new/current URL contents.

How to remove unwanted URL from google cache

4 Answers4