This has been an excellent week in Webmaster Center. Our new Bing community forums are alive and vibrant with excellent questions and people who are willing to share their knowledge. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated. We look forward to your continued participation going forward!
I’ve received a couple great questions on the forums lately and, although we have posted on a few of these topics in the past, I think it is time to expand on one of those topics.
Removing URLs from the index
In our earlier blog post, we provided instructions on how to request URL removals. The previous post indicated that the page must be rendered unavailable to the crawler by a 404 or to use <meta> robots tags. I want to expand on this. Our current requirements for URL removal are (pick one):
There has been some confusion in the past as to what type of request to use.
Remove my content: This is the option to remove the URL from our index. It takes between 48 and 72 hours once the ticket has been created by the Bing support team for the content to be fully removed from the index.
Cache removal: This option will only remove the cached page but not the actual URL from the index. Some have requested this option hoping to trigger a recrawl. However, if that is the goal, this method doesn’t lead to the desired effect. This option is best when there has been an important content change, but the old page is still available.
Unfortunately, we have seen many instances where people have mistakenly asked for a cache removal and after waiting a week or two, they contact us again asking why the page is still in our index. Because URL removal is permanent until you file a reinclusion request (located on the same form), it is imporatant that we accept the requests as they are specifically submitted. We don’t want to make the mistake of removing a URL if you really did only want a cache removal.
When entering your information in the support request form, you have two choices for either option:
If this post did not answer your questions about content removal from the Bing index, please feel free to post your questions on our webmaster forums. Thanks!
-- Brett Yount, Bing Webmaster Center
It is a great topic t learn, but i want to know more huge info. on same.
Interesting post, and it's really helpful, I am a seo-er and need to no follow the page for some time when we do the work.
I have a request - when you said we can blog the page by robot text file, I can't fine how, so do you tell me how is the code to block the page in robots.txt file
Yes, its helpful.
I was in a search for a long time to remove urls from index, and found a correct and up to date article. Thanks.
i thought we need to implement nofollow tag instead of noindex, so thanks for this information
Great info. Will help me to optimize my site.
Gret post and i have another question
How can i do to remove dynamics urls?
Hi Deb,
you can block the page in robots.txt using your normal url structure such as:
/exampledirectory/page. I suggest reading www.bing.com/.../robots-exclusion-protocol-joining-together-to-provide-better-documentation.aspx
Fisher, I suggest reading the post I linked to in Deb's reply. It demonstrates how to use wildcards. If you need more help, post on the forums and I will respond.
~B
Magesh,
nofollow works great when you don't want us to follow a link on your page. Noindex means not to index the current page.
to recap:
you don't want us to crawl example.com/nocrawl.html
all links pointing to that page would benifit from the nofollow tag. The page itself should be blocked using noindex tag or block it in your robots.txt file.
Cheers!
I think it would be better to deny URL removal, if the web page is still available and its index is not blocked in robots.txt.
First of all thanks for nice post but i have one query, like i have comment option on my site now i want to put no follow on comment section but page should be index and comment also should be index, then how to do?
Jackin,
Not sure I'm following this.
"i have comment option on my site now i want to put no follow on comment section but page should be index and comment also should be index, then how to do?"
If you want comments indexed and page indexed, why put a tag at all? Are you thinking of putting tags around links in the comments section to control spam?
I submitted a request for a cached page to be removed over 72 hours ago and was contacted by Bing/Microsft support support and told it would be removed in 48, but it still hasn't been. What gives?
i submitted 2005 url in site but i get error in site map please help me how to solve it.