removing 404 pages from another site

sillysimon60

Hi guys,


Feel free to relocate, i'm not sure where. Just looking for advice:


So basically I had some bad content (a few years old) about my personal self removed from a media website recently. I had it removed in a roundabout way through a contact of a contact. So i don't know who removed it or how it was removed- but the page now returns a 404..... cue relief.

This all happened about a month ago. As the website is a big one it was deindexed in a couple of hours. Recently however it has been reindexed and has remained like this (number 1 in search) for more than a week. the page still shows a 404, but there is a title and snippet with some details, and also a photo that appears in google images (this photo disappeared when the article was gone for a month) . Clicking on the cache shows a 404 too.

Id like to remove it.

I am nervous of using the search console content removal tool to request removal of the content as I don't want to draw any attention to the missing content. I am worried the webmaster might get a notification stating the content is missing and reinstate it somehow.


What do you guys think? Would a webmaster get a notification of this or act on this? do you think I should wait (sometimes can take months) for the 404 to disappear.

Also I don't understand why googlebot would reinstate a 404 page after it disappeared.


Many thanks for advice in advance.

Ronan_wals

It sounds like a sticky situation alright

It sounds a bit funny that it removed and reranked it a month later - It might not of been deindexed at all and google just stopped displaying it to you. The only way to know if its been deindex is this search query

site:www.example.com/page-one.html

It could still have a lot of relevance from links etc and could stay there for a few months but should eventually drop from the rankings but it could take months for it to be completely deindexed.

You can't use search console to remove another sites content you will have to request google removes the content under EU legislation in which case the website owner will definitely be notified as it's a legal matter (you will probably have to prove to Google that you requested the site to take it down as well)

Here's the link: https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch

sillysimon60

thanks for your help