Brandon Mercer, who works at Hearst Newspapers, wrote in the Google Search Console help forums that people are using the “remove outdated content tool” to get rid of competitor pages, and he said it works.nnDanny Sullivan from Google replied, but he doesn’t seem to believe that it really does work.nnThe tool came out in January 2020, and a few months later, it was improved.nnThe tool will let you ask for pages that have a lot of new information that wasn’t in the original story.nnBut Google’s help document says, “If the page is still there but has changed, the snippet and the cached result will be taken out of Search results.nnBoth will be updated the next time Google’s crawler visits the page.nnThe page can still show up in Search results until then.” It shouldn’t get rid of the page and take it off the list.nnBrandon said, “With the “Remove Outdated Content” tool, a news article, even one from a competitor, can be taken out of the index without the site owner having to do anything.nnUsers only have to show one word from the old article that isn’t in the new one.nnWhen a user submits that, Google removes the article from its search results on its own within hours.nnThe only way to find out if this happened to your site is to go to your Search Console and look for pages that have been taken down.”nAfterward, he said, “Many publishers are having this happen.nnOn the webmaster side, there is NO approval process.nnYou can choose to remove ANY URL from indexing.nnThis is a big problem.”nnSo Danny Sullivan from Google came in and wrote, “I’ll pass this on,” he added “but your screenshots aren’t clear.nIn one of them, you show that an old cache was removed.nnThat’s not the same as a page being taken off the site.nnThe tool does let you get rid of a cache or snippet if it no longer shows live content.nnAnd if you find a word that doesn’t appear anymore, that could cause the cache/snippet to be removed.”nnDanny then said it again “For actually removing a page, the tool shouldn’t process a removal if the page itself is still being reported as live and not blocked.nnIn the cases you’ve tested, you’ve found that the page is still live and that it doesn’t have anything blocking it, like a “noindex” attribute, right?”nn”The tool is designed to remove links that are no longer live or snippets that are no longer reflecting live content. We’ll look into this further,” Danny said.nnWhat the tool looks like is as follows:nn
