How to delete a blog
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Hello,
My situation is that the charity I’m working for has requested that I delete a blog for them (burtonmanor.wordpress.com). But the owner or original administrator has left ((email visible only to moderators and staff)). Although I am an administrator, I am not the original administrator. I know there’s no way I can delete the original administrator. I have tried to delete the blog as an administrator, but this failed. It’s likely the original administrator no longer has access to his e-mail (because it’s for a domain that no longer exists). I know that the only way to delete it is via the original administrator’s e-mail. Is there any way to solve this? If he knows his WordPress login can he transfer ownership (not just admin rights) of the blog to me?
Thanks,
Andrew
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Yes, the person who created the blog will have to log in and either delete the blog himself, or transfer ownership to you. http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#transferring-your-blog-to-another-wordpress-com-user-or-account
http://en.support.wordpress.com/delete-site/However, if you have admin rights on the blog you can set it to private. This is actually a better option, as deleting the blog will remove that URL forever, so you’ll never be able to get it back, and besides the blog will still be visible in Google’s cache for several weeks. Setting it to private will immediately make it inaccessible to anyone who is not registered as a user. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
If you are an admin or editor you can also delete any content from the site, including posts, pages, comments, categories and tags: http://en.support.wordpress.com/empty-site/
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Ok thanks. I’ll try and empty the site and make it private like you say.
Would this then demote the ranking in the Google search? (As presumably there would then be no content keywords or title tags for it to locate?)
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Simply setting it to private will cause it to gradually drop in search results as search engines won’t be able to crawl it anymore, whether there still is content or not. It will still take a while to drop in search rank, but even if it comes up in a search people who click on it won’t be able to access the site.
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Ok thanks. I’ve done what you said – how long do you think it will take to get it off page one of the Google search for “Burton Manor”? Thanks again.
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I have no idea as it depends on how often search spiders crawl that URL and which other sites are competing for rankings on the same keywords, etc. If your site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools you can put in a request there to remove it from their search index, but that won’t make a difference to other search engines. (You won’t be able to verify the site now if it’s set to private).
The best is simply to be patient.
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Ok I verified with the Webmaster Tools (after setting the site to public again). I submitted a request to remove the URL burtonmanor.wordpress.com from Google’s Index. Is it now ok to make the site private again or do I wait for the removal to complete in the Webmaster Tools (it’s pending at the moment)?
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Never having done it myself I don’t know, sorry. I would set it back to private so it doesn’t get re-indexed, but I don’t know if that’s the right course of action.
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