Can a message that a site is gone be eliminated?
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We have a site at germantownhillsaperspective.wordpress.com. We are trying to get Google to recognize this site.
However, previously we had a site that was almost the same at germantownhillsperspective.wordpress.com. The only difference was that it did not have the letter “a” after hills.
Even after providing Google’s search bot with the correct new URL, a search on Google keeps going after the old URL at http://germantownhillsperspective.wordpress.com/, which now is just displaying an error message on WordPress that the site is no longer available. And it doesn’t seem to want to display a search for the new one.
Is it possible to turn off the error message at this latter site completely, so Google stops trying to pick it up? I’m going to try to let Google know not to display the results for it, but since I don’t own the site, they may not let me do that.
Any help or suggestions appreciated.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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The only suggestion would be to smile or have a drink of your favorite beverage.
On a more serious note – Google will not accept your feedback on the old site because you can’t verify ownership of the old name because you deleted it. At some point in the future the old site will fall out of the Google search results because the whole site is a not found with just the site deleted message.
I have read that it can take in the 6 month range for Google to update things, however they are still digging up page information from a site I moved over 5 months ago and I own the domain and have given Google around 300 delete page requests for the old file structure.
I have not seen any shortcuts mentioned in the forum other than Patience Grasshopper.
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When any page produces a “404” it is possible to use Google’s URL Removal Tool. This amounts to requesting that Google remove the error message rather than waiting until the next time their caches are cleared which can vary from 3 – 6 months. It’s not guranteed – it’s at their discretion. Please see here > http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2008/03/21/how-to-remove-data-from-googles-cache/
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Timethief,
I think that the problem will be that WordPress doesn’t eliminate the page, leading to a 404, but rather puts its own new page up saying that the document is no longer there. Google will probably see this as legitimate content and never get rid of it.
See: http://germantownhillsperspective.wordpress.com/about/
It actually would be better if when a page is deleted that WordPress would turn it into a 404, for the reasons you cited.
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Google is definitely getting the proper headers to remove the content from it’s index.
Unfortunately, we have no control over when Google decides to remove it, but we are providing the correct information.
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I think the problem is fixed, if it stays that way.
Google has two functions that I used. I went to a site that they have for removing URLs, and requested that the two URLs that WordPress left out (one for the front page of the blog, and the other for the “about” page of it), be removed. I also went to a place on Google where you can request that their search bot would include a new URL, and gave it the replacement blog site.
It took about two days, but as of this morning, when I searched for the site on Google, the new one came up.
I just hope that it stays that way, because earlier I thought it had dropped the old sites, and then they came back. But so far, so good.
Thanks for everyone’s help.
Terry
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