Any way to force a URL out of Google index?
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As far as I know, there is no way to truly FORCE a URL to be removed from Google's index. We have a page that is being stubborn. Even after it was 301 redirected to an internal secure page months ago and a noindex tag was placed on it in the backend, it still remains in the Google index.
I also submitted a request through the remove outdated content tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals and it said the content has been removed. My understanding though is that this only updates the cache to be consistent with the current index. So if it's still in the index, this will not remove it.
Just asking for confirmation - is there truly any way to force a URL out of the index? Or to even suggest more strongly that it be removed?
It's the first listing in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=hcahranswers&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS753US755&oq=hcahr&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60j0l3.1700j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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Thank you! The redirect was my suspicion as well. It's the last issue that could be causing this, thank you for affirming.
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If a "removed" URL keeps popping up, something somewhere is linking to it. Your best bet would be to do some link sleuthing to find out where on the web the link to the old URL lives. If it's on one of your own sites, bingo, just remove it and it will drop away. If it's on an outside site, it's worth trying to contact that old site owner and see if they are willing to update the link.
When you say that you 301'd the old URL to an internal secure URL, does that mean Google can't access the replacement? That could be part of why you still have the problem. If you can 301 it to a new public page which then provides a short bit of content letting humans know there is a new page, and providing them with a link to the new page, then at least you'll be sending Google to a page it can index and also sending humans on to the new private page. This is actually the only case of Google not respecting a 301 I've experienced; as long as you 301 to a page they can at least crawl - even if they are told not to index it - they usually drop the old URL out of the index fairly quickly.
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