If nothing else test the tool to see what an email from Google looks like so you can monitor for someone doing shady and trying to remove your content.
Beyond that, use the tool as needed to remove content or monitor your removed content and that you haven’t tripped Safe Search Filtering.
Announcement & Coverage
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/01/new-removals-report-in-search-console.html
- “We’re happy to announce that we’re launching a new version of the Removals report in Search Console, which enables site owners to temporarily hide a page from appearing in Google Search results. The new report also provides info on pages on your site that have been reported via other Google public tools.”
- https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6349986?hl=en
- https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-launches-new-removals-tool-328328
- “Google gives you two types of removals:
- Temporary remove URL will hide the URL from Google Search results for about six months and clear the cached copy of the page.
- Clear cache URL clears the cached page and wipes out the page description snippet in Search results until the page is crawled again.”
- “Google gives you two types of removals:
The Good
Anytime Google gives us more ways to alert them or tell them via a sitemap.xml, tool or the Google Search Console we are all for it. There may be a number of uses when pages you DON’T want indexed or available but it is, this is just another way to speed things up.
- Wrong/Bad Product Page
- Outdated Page
- Thank You Page
The Bad
We couldn’t think of much as we love when Google gives us more control or ways to inform them of what is going on with the site. The one thing that scares us is how people may look for ways to misuse the Public facing form.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matt Siltala: Hey guys, excited to be here with you on a another one of these episodes. How’s it going, Dave?
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:16] Top of the morning,
Matt Siltala: [00:00:17] top of the board into the afternoon whenever
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:22] is we’re recording. I don’t know.
Matt Siltala: [00:00:23] Or when they’re listening. What else? Whatever you need it to be. Um, but you know, we don’t often jump into these type of topics. Uh, you know, we, we tend to record a few of these at a time and, and, uh, but we kind of felt this one was an interesting one to get into, but, uh, this is something that has to do Dave, with Google’s content removal tool, the new tool that they just put out.
Now, Barry, um, of course posted about it on the 28th of January. And in the morning, I guess, or Google did a post about it in the morning of [00:01:00] January 28th and then Barry posted about it, jumped right on it, and yes, as he does. And, uh, but it’s got some, you know, some as, as always with stuff like this, there’s same some, uh.
Mixed reviews going out of about it. There’s lots of different views and lots of different, uh, um, things that people are saying about it. And so we thought we would probably just jump in and spend a little time, give some of our thoughts like, uh, and Dave, you know, you could talk about, uh, you know, who you were sharing with posted about it earlier if you want.
But, uh, you know, some of my first initial thoughts and our conversations with us is if there’s a way for someone in our industry to abuse it. Hey, well,
Dave Rohrer: [00:01:46] yup.
Matt Siltala: [00:01:46] And so again, those are like my absolute very first thoughts and I’m thinking, okay, well, you know, who’s to say that a, again, we joke about, uh, we, we just talked about the, uh, the, the term span that we [00:02:00] believe, uh, it was Brett tap key, right?
That, uh, you know, sites the sites position above mine. Damn. And so, you know,
Dave Rohrer: [00:02:10] everything’s spam. If it’s in front of me, that’s the only reason.
Matt Siltala: [00:02:14] So let’s go and report these guys. Well, is it outdated content? It’s spam. It’s above me. I’m going to get rid of them. And so anyway, and then how many, um, fake. Google accounts.
Do people have, I was just joking with you. I think my kids probably have for each, but, um, and they’re not even in this industry. It’s so, uh, I dunno. Well, if you know, what are your thoughts on this?
Dave Rohrer: [00:02:38] Yeah, so the public, um, you know, the Google blog, it’s the, the, their post went up on the 28th. It was new removals report in search console.
And then Barry’s report, um, he probably has it on se round table, but he was on search engine land and went up, uh, what LLS 9:00 AM, um, [00:03:00] on search engine land. And it was, you know, Google search console launches, new removals tool. And he does a really great job of digging into, um, kinda repeat some of it as he does from the blog post, but he’s got the shots and breaks it down pretty quickly about.
There, there is a temporary temporary removal. Um, there’s outdated content. And then also safe search filtering, which I don’t, whenever I do an audit for an technical side of things, I usually hope, and most people don’t have it. So if you don’t have being webmaster tools set up, please go set that up. Um.
We’ve talked about it before, and I’ll keep mentioning it because most times people do not have it set up unless they’re an SEO. Um, go set that up. Um, it does give you data. It does give you lots of interesting insights as well, but anytime I can, I look and see if there’s any sort of, anything has been flagged.
Um, any security or manual actions against any [00:04:00] types of sites that I’m doing review on. Um, I look for security issues. I look through their, you know, whatever their CMS is. Usually if it’s WordPress, I look through for security holes. I do save search type stuff. I look and make sure that, you know, they’re not being flagged or anything.
Just weird stuff that may or may not be impacting you. Um, but the safe search, safe search filtering might be interesting because there might be one off pages. That, you know, especially if you’re in a health or some type of content, maybe pushes aligned somehow or it might get flagged because of certain keywords.
You know, like, just like in YouTube, if you do stuff in YouTube, there’s a lot of keywords now that if you mention them, you can get demonetized like almost immediately is my understanding that you can get your content demonetize monetize, which is, you know, if you’re making your life. Your, your, your money off of that, that is the worst thing you can do.
So there are certain keywords that will trigger [00:05:00] demonetization because advertisers, which I can’t really blame them, don’t want to be associated with that type of content. Um, which is interesting because there could be, yeah. We won’t get into that. That’s, yeah, that’s, that’s a whole weird topic. Um. For me that’s interesting to see the safe search filtering, outdated content, temporary removals.
Um,
Matt Siltala: [00:05:24] I just see so many competitors, um, abusing this, but one of the things that I think that we discovered was, uh, you have to be logged in for this to work. Now again, it’s goes back to the fake accounts and people still abusing this. But, um, I mean, do you think that would factor into more people being able to still abuse it or not?
Dave Rohrer: [00:05:45] I was trying to, I literally didn’t, I missed this the other day and I’m just playing around with it today. Um, so how do I use the tool? You go to tools, removal of webmasters, so it isn’t a webmaster. And I tried to, I tried to get to it without being [00:06:00] logged in and basically it gives me the, the Heisman kind of stiff arm, and I was like, no, you’ve gotta log in with one of your accounts.
So I think that could make it a little bit more difficult. Perhaps, but yeah. How many accounts does people, you know, with the VPN and you know, a burner Google account, you know, that you set up your automated, at least set up what you can do. Um, you know, I don’t think that it’s just an extra step. Yeah. So the people that really want to misuse this will probably misuse it, you know, go through and take out your five competitors.
Main site pages.
Matt Siltala: [00:06:42] Yeah. I just,
Dave Rohrer: [00:06:44] it will be view it. Um, but I just wonder ho I don’t, I didn’t always assume that people are gonna miss you. Stuff like this. I just hope that the mind, it’s small because it is kind of handy.
Matt Siltala: [00:06:56] Well, that’s what I was going to say. The sad thing too, this is, I can understand [00:07:00] why they’re getting, cause I’m, I, I think about, especially in our industry, like I think about the poor individuals coming into this industry.
And if someone has turned dates or comments or whatever off on their blog post, and there are the quote unquote SEO blog, and I’m reading a post, or I’m going through and I’m searching a certain tag and I’m reading all these posts, but I don’t know that I’m reading a post that was written back in 2003 and it’s talking about something and I’m like, you know, should I be doing that still or.
Does this really work? Or, and again, that’s an extreme example of going all the way back 2003 but even, you know, going back to 2014 and doing some of the stuff that was recommended, like, so I can see like the, the, the, the, the reason why that they did it, and I can see the positive side of it, but again, just that, you know, that marketer and me knows that this industry is going to try to figure out some way to exploit it and ruin
Dave Rohrer: [00:07:59] it.
[00:08:00] Always someone that ruins it for everyone.
Matt Siltala: [00:08:04] And I, and again, maybe not even I should say like the black hat side or just the, I don’t know, you know, just, uh, those that will abuse those, that those people that are outranking and they just want that edge. And, um, I can, I can see them trying to take advantage of it in a not so nice way.
Have you heard feedback from anyone else on it?
Dave Rohrer: [00:08:26] No, I haven’t. Um, I haven’t seen that really that much, but it was interesting. I mean, I have a large number of, I don’t even know how many sites at this point. Uh, access to a lot of accounts and a lot of sites, a lot of domains, and a lot of, um, Google search console accounts and out of all of them.
Only one of them is currently, which I was a bit shocked and it’s my conference site where I tried to remove some stuff or just block it cause I was tired of Google trying to crawl it and telling me that it was a bad old [00:09:00] page. I’m literally the only two pages that have our flag does outdated page removal in all of my accounts, um, are two from my little conference site, which is kind of old.
Impressive and weird. Yeah. You would have expected more. Um, I don’t usually remove a lot. Um, at least not with the tools. I might have to look at it more often. Usually it’s a mix of three O ones and four fours and you know, some other kind of thing to get it out. Um, but if you do need a specific page or if there’s a legal reason or some other reason.
Them beefing up this tool or these, this set of tools and also making it a little bit easier to find. I’m very happy to see, um, the outdated content thing is a little weird. Um, like, to me, like, it’s like, what is, when you, when you see what is this? It says [00:10:00] outdated content. It’s like, what does that mean? Um, and that’s what the public’s going to flag.
So the temporary removals is what you flag. The outdated content is what someone, you know, Joe public, um, or Josephine, um, as you know, requested. So it’s part of my audit. I’m going to have to make sure that, you know, there’s not anything weird going on with, you know, competitors going forward that competitors are doing, you know, bad stuff for that.
A single person is, you know, trying to cause them harm. Well,
Matt Siltala: [00:10:36] also educating those that we work with on this because they’re going to want to go in and like, Hey, let’s go remove all the content of my competitor. And
Dave Rohrer: [00:10:44] I don’t think that many people will do it. Honestly. I just think there’s going to be a few bad seeds, or, I mean, I’m, I’m actually tempted to try it on one of my own sites just to see what happens.
So. Um, I’m already looking through one of my sites to figure out [00:11:00] which page I actually want removed. And, uh,
Matt Siltala: [00:11:02] I wonder if they’re getting any kind of notice, like if they get any kind of notification.
Dave Rohrer: [00:11:06] That’s what, yeah, that’s what I’m curious. Um, like I said, we, right before we started, I literally saw this stuff like five minutes before we started recording today, and I was like, Ooh, that’s interesting.
Um, so I’ve just been doing some research on it this morning, but I’m gonna probably try and. With my own in my own sites, just so that I know what the email looks like. I can create an email alert, um, in my, you know, in whatever email system you use, just to flag it of
Matt Siltala: [00:11:36] some old outdated content somewhere.
Dave,
Dave Rohrer: [00:11:40] probably on one of my sites. Yeah. Uh, I’m sure I do. Well, no, but I’m just thinking through, like to make sure that I don’t, if someone does try to go in there, does it send an email? If it does. I’m going to, I want to see that email and I want to create an alert in my email system, whether it’s going to my [00:12:00] Gmail or my, um, you know, outlook.
I want to create a thing that’ll flag it for me.
Matt Siltala: [00:12:06] So what are we telling you here? People like the same thing we’ve been telling you forever. Test,
Dave Rohrer: [00:12:11] test attention
Matt Siltala: [00:12:12] and pay attention. And, uh, figuring out, you know, it could end up being a great thing. Like I, like I talked about like. Know, I could see it being very useful for certain specific industries.
Tom,
Dave Rohrer: [00:12:25] I see a lot of use for either content. Um, problem is, is a lot of times when, like I just did an audit where we had like a hundred thousand pages we wanted out at this tool isn’t going to work. Um, but if you have a product page or, um, say you’re some sort of SAS and. That feature is no longer around, or you know, like Facebook or Google, you know, has, it has something that they take away from Google webmaster tools, which they kind of do from time to time or analytics or any of their tools.
And you want to make it so that you know, [00:13:00] the other search engines don’t know about it. Not a bad idea. Or if you screw up. And you push a page before a migration, you can go through, um, if Google gets through, you know, and it’s really like water. Um, it finds its way through everything. Even if you have no index, no follows and stuff.
If it finds some pages internally that you’ve just, you know, like thank you pages. Um, as I think about what I might use it for, one of my clients, um, we should probably take some of those thank you pages out. We can go through and do it. Um. With the tool. Maybe we could have before, but you know, it only lasts six months.
Matt Siltala: [00:13:41] Just makes it
Dave Rohrer: [00:13:41] easier, but it just makes, and it saves search. I haven’t worked with any clients recently that would probably run a fall from this. But again, you know, just looking to see if you’ve been caught up somehow in some way because of the type of content. If it’s more medical, you know, maybe it’s a.
[00:14:00] They’re somehow wrongly putting you in bucket. You knew with different types of sites. I know someone that just registered a domain the other day, um, and I know he listens from time to time. First thing I thought was that he had just rescued registered a porn site cause I was
Matt Siltala: [00:14:16] like,
Dave Rohrer: [00:14:18] dude, that domain it’s going to get you flagged.
I’m curious to see if it does get flagged just because of what it is we’ll see. Um, if it has no history, maybe it’s got a better chance, but yeah, for like that domain, I, I’d be curious to see if it just gets, it finds its way into safe search. Anyway.
Matt Siltala: [00:14:35] That’s funny. Do I know this friend?
Dave Rohrer: [00:14:38] Yes. You do
Matt Siltala: [00:14:41] have to.
I’ll have to ping you when we’re off the air. Yes. I’ll tell you who it is after.
Dave Rohrer: [00:14:47] Um, but yeah. You know, anytime Google gives us more insight into stuff like this and more ability, I’m not so crazy about the, you know, letting people flag stuff. We’ll see how that goes. Maybe they’ll take that [00:15:00] away. Um, who knows?
Maybe, you know, if five people or even 50 or 105 hundred people screw with it, that’s probably not enough for them to. Be annoyed. Um, and I’m sure they can pretty quickly look at one account and go, wow, you went to eight different sites within 15 minutes and flagged, you know, 30 pages, whatever you’re done dealing with
Matt Siltala: [00:15:22] Google.
They’re pretty smart. So,
Dave Rohrer: [00:15:23] yeah, they’ve got access. And you know, again, it’s just another thing for me that I’ll start making sure that whenever I do an audit or everyone, anytime when I talk to my clients. You know, make sure no one is going through and screwing with your site and flagging you. Um, and make sure that, you know, the temporary removals, whether it’s been you or Google.
Um, cause like I blocked in October, you know, my conference, like my one slash day. Um, and anything under program. Um, I blocked these two different directories cause I was tired of everything showing up in the four fours and redirects and stuff. [00:16:00] And is there is nothing there. That’s what I talked about when I talked about the site map stuff couple of weeks ago.
That was, that was the content that wasn’t supposed to be indexed. That was the stuff. So yeah, I think anytime they can give us more access to this and more abilities, um, I’m, I’m all for it.
Matt Siltala: [00:16:18] Well, I mean I just wanted to make sure you guys were aware of it, cause I’m sure that there’s going to be quite a few people that hear this then it might be the first time that they’re hearing about this.
But. Uh, well, yeah, and I mean, as much as berries, everywhere, you know, sometimes we miss stuff that he puts out there and sometimes we miss a Google update and, uh, or post, I guess. Uh, anyway. All right, well, um, thank you guys for listening. As always, we want to encourage you, if you’re a fan of this podcast, please, please, please go and check us out on iTunes.
Uh, write us a review. We would love for you to, uh, to give us a review. And, um, yeah, I mean, we’ll accept that as [00:17:00] well. Awesome. Well thanks guys. We’ll for Dave with the North Northside metrics I met with avalanche media and thank you guys for joining us. Bye bye.
Dave Rohrer: [00:17:10] Thanks.
Leave a Reply