How do I prevent a name from coming up on your search engine.  I put a
client's name on our website as a reference.  His name continues to
come up even though I deleted it from the website.  He doesn't want
his name on the internet.

Hello cindy825,

Generally speaking, all search engines reindex (or research) existing
webpages on different schedules.  Google is the same way.  Once your
site has been reindexed, the content that no longer exists will be
removed from the search engine.  This can, however, take several
months.

To ensure your information is removed, I would use Google's remove
content page at : ://www.google.com/remove.html

This allows you to remove or change all of the following: 

Change the URL of your website 
Remove your website 
Remove individual pages 
Remove snippets 
Remove cached pages 
Remove an outdated ("dead") link 
Remove an image from Google's Image Search 

Please note however, as mentioned on the page, it does take 6-8 weeks
for the change to be processed at the next scheduled reindexing.

The exact url you would probably want is
://www.google.com/remove.html#exclude_pages to remove the page
containing the content you wish to remove.

I hope you have found this helpful, please ask for clarification if necessary.

``mosquitohawk-ga

---

Request for Answer Clarification by cindy825-ga on 23 Feb 2004 10:12 PST

I need to remove just this customer's name and town from one page on
our website.  It sounds like that will exclude the robot from visiting
that page if I do it.  How do I take off Richard Shulman, Elkins Park
from www.giroudtree.com/page5.html?  Thanks!  Cindy

---

Clarification of Answer by mosquitohawk-ga on 23 Feb 2004 13:36 PST

If all you want to do is remove that customer's information, I would
suggest simply removing the information from the page and either wait
for the search engines to reindex your site, or resubmit just that
page to google.com and add it to the list of sites to be crawled:
://www.google.com/addurl.html

Otherwise, you can email googlebot@google.com and explain the problem you're having.

Hey Cindy,
I'm not a Google researcher and I don't know if what I'm about to tell
you is correct, but if I were you this is what I'd do.

I'd include the meta code for removing the page and removing the
cached page and then I'd register that page to be removed by google
through the automatic removal thingy.

In the meantime, I would make a duplicate of the new page, I'd rename
the filename to something else, and I would make sure that every page
on the site points to the new filename. With the new filename, I'm
assuming Google and the other search engines will treat it as a
different page the next time they come through.

By the way, your next stop should be the Way back machine, that robot
kept many versions of your page, and the Way back machine is very
popular for people who are looking for people -- so you should remove
it from there as well.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.giroudtree.com/page5.html?

Here is their removal procedure.
http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php

Postscript: One point of clarification, when I said make a duplicate,
obviously I should have said make a duplicate without the meta tag,
and then rename the filename.