What is the fastest way to deindex content from Google?

[RosemaryB]

Yesterday we had a client discover that our staging URLs were being indexed in Google.  This was due to a technical oversight from our development team (forgot to upload meta robots tags).

We are trying to remove this content as quickly as possible.   Are there any methods in the Google Search Console to expedite this process?

Thanks

[RosemaryB]

Excellent answer.  Thank you very much.

[becole]

Rosemary, in order to remove the content quickly, you have to do several things. You see, Google's processes for crawling, etc. and removing content from the index don't always happen all at once. So, it's best to do several things:

• Remove the content. When visitors or bots visit the URL, use the "410 Gone" server header code to ensure that it's not just a 404 error being used.

• If the content must stay and cannot be removed but still needs to be removed from Google's index, consider password protecting the content, putting it behind a paywall, making users log in to see the content, and/or adding a meta robots noindex tag on the page.

• Add a robots.txt file on the subdomain so that it tells the bots to stop crawling. If you use something like dev.yourdomain.com for a dev section of the site, make sure that you have a robots.txt file at dev.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

• Use Google Search Console to remove the content. Once logged in, use the removal tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1

By using several approaches, this is going to be the fastest way to remove the content.