OK, so my Wordpress installation is obviously pissed at me and has decided to passive-aggressively retaliate by not sending me an email when somebody leaves a comment on my blog. Yesterday I read a comment on this post left by the subject of the post himself, Jeremy Turner–Abstract Artist. Unfortunately the comment has been held in queue for a month now while I left this site on the back burner. Can we talk about this, Wordpress? Why do you want to hurt me? You can read the comment yourself, but my interpretation of events is that Jeremy is painfully aware of his site’s condition, and would like nothing more than to just get its remains off the internet and out of your search results. I feel bad for “rubbing in” the fact that his sites was broken yet at the time still highly ranked by Google, so I am going to try and help. Jeremy asked if there’s any way to remove himself from the game so to speak and I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk a bit more about the tools offered by the big three search engines to do just that. I’ve mentioned these tools before but Jeremy’s comment has inspired me to explain myself a bit further and share why these tools are helpful and possibly essential for managing your search presence.
Read on to find out how to rid the internet of your own ancient remains. Before I get in to the details, after re-familiarizing myself with these three products as research for this post, it seems the simplest way to remove your ancient remains from the internet is to add the “noindex” meta-tag to the header of your site, and/or disallow all web crawlers in your robots.txt file. If that is all you are looking to do then click on those two links, follow the instructions and have at it. All you need is a clear head, a text editor, and FTP access to your web host. If you are looking to do more please read on for a summary of the three products I use to manage search results for the websites I administer.
Google Webmaster Tools
This is probably the one you’ll want to sign up for first, since 60% or more of all search traffic comes from Google. Even if this is in decline Google has got a way to go before you can question their dominance. Sign up for an account, add the URL or URLs you would like to track, verify your control of the site(s) by adding a meta tag or uploading a specifically formatted file which Google provides, and away you go. From your Webmaster Tools account you can manage exactly what pages you do and don’t want to show up in Google searches, and point Google to a sitemap of your website to make it easily digestible by the Google Robots. You can remove entire directories from search—say a folder filled with PDFs, javascripts or your “images” directory—set the preferred “canonical” version of your URL (www or no www), set your geographic target, allow or disallow image search, see the top search queries that get people to your site, easily see what other websites link to yours, control sitelinks if Google has bestowed such an honor upon you, create custom 404 error pages, and um a few other awesome things. I don’t want to spoil it for you, just sign up already. Considering of the impetus of this post I will go on to say that once you set up your website to be tracked by Webmaster Tools you can download a list of all of the pages that Google has indexed and delete the ones that are no longer relevant. You also have the option to delete your entire site from Google results. I actually did this yesterday with my jeremyturner.info domain because it is still ranking higher for queries than jeremyturner.net, and I am concerned that Google may be docking my site for having duplicate content because of the two URLs. You can find a more specific explanation on how to remove your site from Google here.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Same concept as Webmaster Tools, except lamer because it’s Yahoo! Verify your site with either a meta-tag in the <head> of your site, or upload a file, and you are on your way. They provide you with the tools to remove individual URLs (although for some odd reason you are limited to 25 removals. What gives, Yahoo?) or you can remove your entire site. Neither Yahoo! Site Explorer nor Windows Live are as comprehensive as Webmaster Tools, but they get the job done, and their lack of complexity accurately correlates to the amount of time one should spend fiddling with each of them. Start with Webmaster Tools and work your way down. Of course because your mom has never changed her homepage from MSN you might want to start with Windows Live first.
Windows Live
Of the three, this one has the most convoluted sign-up process coupled with the hardest to find URL. I would expect nothing less from our friends in Redmond. And just like the other two, you authenticate your site and you are rewarded with tools to validate various parts of your site, check who links to you, who you link to, research the keywords that bring people to your site, point the MSN web crawler to your sitemap, etc. To remove your site from MSN they suggest adding the “noindex” meta tag to the header of your site, or disallowing their crawler in your robot.txt file.
OK, so there’s a quick overview of the three products, now get out there boys/girls and start managing your search presence! It’s the only way to keep your past failures from cropping up every time you do a vanity search for your name. Now if I could just convince Have you found out anything surprising about you or your site, like why is nambla.org linking to my site, or gosh I must have a man-crush on Merlin because I link to his site in every blog post, etc.? Let me know in the comments area. Thanks again for stopping by
Posted on February 22nd, 2009 by Jeremy Turner
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