The Google Freshness Factor - Google's Removal Tool and Duplicate Content

The Google Freshness Factor - Google's Removal Tool and Duplicate Content

Another particular problem recently presented to the freshness factor, is Google’s own Removal Tool. Experiences with this tool have been much on the side of unpleasant, if at all useful. For some, the Google removal tool has been often mentioned “as a cure against many diseases.” Diseases such as duplicate content or temporary redirects, for example. While I have used it from time to time, I have done so with a cautionary tone, and never used it on a commercial website; rather only on my personal website or blog. Some of the side effects observed are definitely worth mentioning here, and I know I’m not alone.

If you’ve ever used the removal tool, you’ll notice that the page count of the website in question has not been changed, but rather the pages simply fail to show up. Why is this? Because with the URL Removal Tool, these URLs have not been deleted; they have only been filtered out. So even though these pages appear to have been removed, they are certainly still in the database somewhere.

The period of time Google uses to remove these URLs from their index is anywhere between three and six months. I say from three to six months, even though the Google documentation tells us 180 days; in my personal experience, it has been more like 90 days. Regardless of the period of time, rest assured, they are actually still there. How do I know this? Two reasons: one, I mentioned before that the number of pages are still listed as the same amount before the pages were removed; two, after the removal period, they show right back up in the index, as if they’d never left.

Further, it has been observed that on a site where a set of pages tagged with . After natural cycles of crawling, those pages being phased out by the spider, because of the robots meta tag, it was shown that these pages still held their PageRank. Whereas, for pages in which the Removal Tool was used, those pages show absolutely no PageRank, as opposed to the Googlebot removed pages showing with a PageRank of 3 or 4. So, although none of these pages are indexed, the pages that use the pages still carry PR and are probably capable to transfer PR to other pages, where the tool-removed pages do not.

Consider, also that links from removed pages are actually dead links. On the example site mentioned above there are rows of pages linked as page1->page2->page3->... After removing page2 with the removal tool, page3 and all subsequent pages weren't spidered.

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