How to get taken off Google

[Steven Barkess]

Hi

Yes, I do indeed want to be taken off Google.

If I do a search on Google for my business name, finally I am coming up on the front page. However, there is also at least 1 thread from Actinic coming up too. This never used to happen, and I beleive it only has since the community changed.

Many of my previous posts have my web address and business name in them.

Has any one had similar experiences and ideas on how one can be removed. It just looks unprofessional to viewers in my eyes.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Steven

[Mike Hughes]

There's no real way around it I'm afraid. You can ask Google to remove your site it you can show you own it, but not to remove a page on someone else's server.

Mike

[AsleepATheWheel]

Well Mike is nearly right, but you dont have to ask Google, you can just put this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: *

That will stop ALL the main search engines from crawling ALL the pages of your site.

No way to do it to someone elses site though........

[cdicken]

This never used to happen, and I beleive it only has since the community changed.

It is more likely that it has happened because Google has done a spidering of the community in the last few weeks. I'll get a 'robots.txt' file placed in the site to stop this from happening. Links to this site in Google will start dropping off after a while.

[Steven Barkess]

Thanks Chris, appreciate your work.

Steve.

[Marci]

Crap... I use google to search the community (using the site: parameter in google you can limit google to searching one site) as it tends to give better results than the vB3 search engine...

[garyhay]

And it directs people here if they search for Actinic and its not a bad place to start.

[AsleepATheWheel]

I must agree, it is a bad idea in general to stop Google crawling the forum. If someone is searching for a specific problem in Google, and the answer is here, then they won't be able to find it. It would be better to let people edit there posts indefinatly, instead of just up to 10 minutes, they could then take off anything that they may regret putting up at a later date (such as there company name).

Paul

[cdicken]

Many thanks for your comments on this.

I have now removed the robots.txt file and have edited the Community settings so people can now edit their posts indefinitely in order to remove URLs etc.

[Steven Barkess]

So far I have only found one reference coming up when you do a search on my company name, unfortunatley that is the first result, my actual company is about 5th or 6th.

I was careful when I made that post, someone else actually typed my company name and to that end, I cannot edit it out... link is http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=7582

Apart from contacting the author, are there any suggestions for examples like this?

All good fun.

Thanks

Steven

[cdicken]

Just email me at communityadmin [@] actinic.co.uk with the location of the post. I can edit it on your behalf.

[garyhay]

Good move Chris. We all fight hard and long to get on Google so no point throwing links away