Withdrawal Pains

I'm always working on getting things into Google but yesterday I had to get something out of Google and I was so impressed at their responsiveness. Somehow two pages of a client's internal data - nothing earth-shattering, but internal stuff- got into a public folder and ended up in Google, which was not supposed to happen.

It's legendary that you can't get something out of Google, but I checked their FAQ and there is a process. First I replaced the offending files with blank files using the same filename, so that if somebody clicked on the Google listing the page opens to an empty page. In those blank pages I included the "robots/no-cache" code that the FAQ suggested.

Google caches everything, which means they store it in a stash. Google can show you what a web page looked like last week even after it's changed. So I submitted a request to have the two files removed from the Google cache, and about five hours later it was gone. No service charge. I ws very impressed at their responsiveness.