Microsoft is offering webmasters and website owners the possibility to remove content and URLs from the Live Search index. The Redmond company assures that it intends for its crawler to play nice with robots.txt files and inherently with the Robots Exclusion Protocol, in order to give content owners a high level of control over what gets indexed by the search engine. In this context, the software giant is ready to take down content that was indexed by Live Search because pages were not blocked initially or because of other technical reasons.
“If there is content that you want removed, the best thing to do is to specify this exclusion in either your robots.txt file or add a meta tag exclusion within the <head> tag at the top of your HTML page (for example: <meta name="robots"
content="noindex, nofollow">Once the page is recrawled, we remove the content from our index automatically. However, if time is an issue or the page is still alive in the cache, we have a process that you can use to have URLs removed more quickly,” revealed
Jeremiah Andrick – program manager, Live Search Webmaster Center.
Ensuring that the pages that subsequently are to be removed from the index are no longer available to the crawler is the first step webmasters and content owners have to take. Microsoft indicated that this aspect can be verified when the pages slated to be removed from index return a 404 file not found error (for removed content). Next in line is filling the
Live Search Support form.
“Identify from where in Live Search you want the URL removed. To quickly remove a URL, select Content Removal Request from the form’s drop-down list. Select one of these resulting options for removal: Remove my content. If you want the URL completely removed from our index, select this option. This is a permanent removal. Should you want this URL indexed again in the future, you will need to fill out a Content Inclusion Request from the same support form. Cache removal. If you just want the cached page removed, use this option. Note that this will not remove the URL from our index,” Andrick added.
Following the submission of the form, Microsoft promises that within 48 hours of the moment that the request was received, the content will be pulled down from the Live Search index. Andrick additionally informed that the software giant was looking into providing a tool to automate the process, but for now the process described above is the only way to remove content and URLs from Live Search's index.
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