Friday, August 06, 2010
Change can happen—sometimes, as we saw in our previous post on URL removals, you may completely block or remove a page from your site. Other times you might only change parts of a page, or remove certain pieces of text. Depending on how frequently a page is being crawled, it can take some time before these changes get reflected in our search results. In this blog post we'll look at the steps you can take if we're still showing old, removed content in our search results, either in the form of a "snippet" or on the cached page that's linked to from the search result. Doing this makes sense when the old content contains sensitive information that needs to be removed quickly—it's not necessary to do this when you just update a website normally.
As an example, let's look at the following fictitious search result:
| Walter E. Coyote | < Title |
|
Chief Development Officer at Acme Corp 1948-2003: worked on the top |
< Snippet |
| www.example.com/about/waltercoyote - Cached | < URL + link to cached page |
To change the content shown in the snippet (or on the linked cached page), you'll first need to change the content on the actual (live) page. Unless a page's publicly visible content is changed, Google's automatic processes will continue to show parts of the original content in our search results.
Once the page's content has been changed, there are several options available to make those changes visible in our search results:
-
Wait for Googlebot to re-crawl and re-index the page: