Deleted Photo still visible and linking to this site in Google Search

• 

  babymakesthree2012 · Member · Jun 2, 2018 at 5:08 am

  • Copy link
  • Add topic to favorites

  Hi,

  I have a personal/family blog that is password protected as I have lots of photo’s of my children. There is one particular photo that I have deleted from a post and permanently deleted from the media library of my blog. The blog and this particular post are also listed as password protected. However, when I do a basic google search of my name, this particular photo is visible in google images (although deleted from the actual post) and links to the blog. Why is this?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

• 

  staartmees · Member · Jun 2, 2018 at 5:12 am

  • Copy link

  Google and other search engines, don’t scan your site daily. It can take a few weeks before they visit your site. In the meanwhile that picture is in their cache untill they visite your site again and update.

• 

  kokkieh · Staff · Jun 3, 2018 at 10:45 am

  • Copy link

  Hi there,

  Search engines save copies of data they find on your site in their caches on their servers. Deleting a file from your site does not remove it from those caches, as we don’t have access to Google’s and Yahoo’s and Bing’s servers to remove the images there. So the image might still be visible in Google searches for a few weeks until they flush it from their cache.

  You can try contacting Google directly and ask them to remove it, but we’re not able to help with this.

• 

  metabart · Member · Jun 3, 2018 at 11:01 am

  • Copy link

  @kokkieh I thought password protected posts were only available for people with the password. How are Google able to index them? What’s the point of password protected if Google can access and index it? I’m new here so I am confused by this.

• 

  kokkieh · Staff · Jun 3, 2018 at 3:15 pm

  • Copy link

  @metabart

  The content of password protected posts are protected. But the images are only embedded in a post, they don’t form part of the post content, and the actual image file in the media library is not protected. Anyone with a direct link to the media file can view it without a password, and if the site itself is set to public it can be indexed by search engines. And the OP’s site was public up to three days ago.

• 

  metabart · Member · Jun 3, 2018 at 4:16 pm

  • Copy link

  @kokkieh thank you for that. I understand now, it’s good to know that. The OP didn’t state that her site was originally public, so I worryingly thought that Google was able to access a private blog. I appreciate your reply.

• 

  kokkieh · Staff · Jun 3, 2018 at 5:47 pm

  • Copy link

  Happy to help :)