Private Site Still Indexed By Google

  • Unknown's avatar
    caldragonboat · Member ·

    Hello! I set my site to a private setting and am wondering why Google is still indexing it. Ideally, I would like the site removed by Google so that only people with the specific link and username/password can access the account. Please advise me on how to proceed. Thank you!

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

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    As of the moment you switched the site to private no crawler from any search engine can access it any more, so your site is not being indexed any more.

    However, setting a site to private does not remove already-indexed content from search engines – to do that we’d have to have access to Google’s and Bing’s and Yahoo’s and all the others’ servers, and we don’t.

    So while your site is no longer being indexed, it might still appear in search results for weeks or even months, depending on how often the various search engines update their indexes or clear their caches. The only way to completely remove a site from search results is to contact the respective search engines directly, and even then some of them won’t do that on request.

    Should anyone find a link to your site via Google clicking on the link will just take them to an error page saying the site is private – they won’t be able to access your site that way, though they will be able to view content that is cached by Google and other services until those caches are cleared.

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