- tips, tricks, & aids -

internet archive removal

by: Sharon Marie Agnello

Google:
(This is my considered best method suggestion, but you can just skip to Step Three if you prefer.)

• Step One - Removing an old page(s) from their index
  You wll first need to add a new page named the same as the page you want removed. Then add the following META tag to the new page: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
• Step Two - Removing the page(s) from their cache
  Add the following META tag to your page: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
• Step Three:
  Submit the page(s) URL to the "Webpage removal request tool".

You should see results within a few days.

WayBack Machine:
The WayBack Machine takes a monthly "screenshot" of the entire web for archival purposes. This is a great research tool for webmasters and seo analysts in determining a site's age... vs. the domain's age that can be found by doing a "whois" search. However, if you don't want your site to be included in this archive, just add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

This should remove all documents on your domain from their archive and prevent further crawling of your site by the WayBack Machine.

Other Sites:
Removing content from other people's sites is not quite as easy. First, you have to know which sites have the archived material. And most times, just asking them to remove the content is all you will need to do. If they don't remove the content, there's nothing more you can do other than take legal action... keep in mind, you may not have much of a case.