When does Google let go...?

[dlenos]

I have a client whose top exec used to work for Company 'A' - if you Google the execs name there are several articles/pages that come up from Company A listing him as the CEO etc. (this is a BIG company - and he was on their leadership page)

The problem is that he has been away from Company A for 18 months and their site was updated over a year ago to remove him from it. When will Google come to understand that those pages no longer exist (at least the content on them has changed - new CEO etc) and not pull the old version up in the results lists for the exec? Is there anything that can be done to facilitate that?

[brian.mark]

My guess (without knowing the exact URL) is that there are links from all over the web pointing to that page with the person's name as the anchor text. This will make it tough to overcome, unless you get those links changed.

Brian.

[hhheng]

It takes some time, maybe one year. For a small company like mine, any changes will take 1 month for google to update.

[incrediblehelp]

I agree with Brian. If certain articles are fairly popular, the article may never disappear regardless of what you do on the company website.

Have you considered tweaking the article to at least acknowledge the executive is gone?

[tinobuntic]

If you click on the link in the Google search results and the page shows up, then the page actually does still exist. It will be like that until the company actually removes that page from the server.

The company in question may have replaced the link to that page with a link to another page without actually removing the old page. There may not be links to the old page anymore but the page would actually still exist until it's completely removed from the server.

If a page gets removed from the server and it's still in search results, a click on the link in the search result would result in a page that shows some kind of error like "page not found." If this is the case, then Google still has it in its cache but will be removed as soon as it finds out that the page is gone.

[optimalwebsite]

Why not talk to the company and ask them to add this to the page?

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

It's supposed to get google to deindex a page, I haven't used it myself so can't vouch for it personally. But if all else fails, it might be worth a shot.