Sunday 9 March 2008

Unindexing

I don't often write posts which are purely personal but I feel so relieved and grateful at the moment that I just want to share these feelings with the whole world.


Scenario

  • I mentioned someone's name in a post.
  • Google (and, of course, other search engines) crawled the post and indexed the name in connection with this blog's principal index terms.
  • Someone objected most vociferously (electronically not physically thank heavens).
  • I immediately pulled the post but that does not, of course, remove the text from Google's cache so I hadn't done enough.
  • I gave up trying to get Google to unindex which requires validation of site ownership which requires some techie stuff which I thought I understood but couldn't get Blogger to accept -- and then Blogger went down for several hours!

Lo and behold the answer to prayer -- this morning Google has no visible link between the named person and this blog, me as an individual or ADSET.

There is still the issue of getting rid of cached information in RSS readers but I think I will probably make matters worse if I try to do any more.

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