New Google Webmaster Tools Functionality
Search Engine Land report that Google has added new functionality to it’s Webmaster Tools suite (or Google Sitemap as it’s more commonly know).
This will allow site owners to remove individual URLs from Google’s index, so long as they have a Webmaster Tools account set up & have verified their ownership of the site in question.
As Danny Sullivan notes, the simplest & safest way to? remove content is to make use of a robots.txt file or meta robots tag, but this addition to the Google Sitemap does allow retorspective URL removal.
If you’ve got any questions about how any of these options can be used to improve your search engine optimisation, or even why you might want to stop certain pages on your website being indexed (generally issues with duplicate content or out of date material), feel free to post a comment below or simply drop us a line.
