Q: One of our sites with private information got accidentally indexed in Google. We’ve deleted the site from the server entirely, but the listing is still showing up in Google. Help! How can I get our site out of Google quickly?

A: There are two ways to remove your site from Google quickly:

1. Verify the site in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and submit a removal request, as seen here:

URLs generally get removed quickly (within a hour) once requested in GWT. To verify your site, follow the instructions here. The HTML file method of verification will probably be your best bet.

2. Force your server to respond with a “410” status code. This would be the strongest status message to Google to remove the URL from the index the next time it crawls the page.

It’s possible that Google could remove the site next time it crawls, because you have removed the content. However, sometimes Google will wait a while and re-crawl, giving site errors a chance to clear up. We recommend taking the above steps to get the listing out of Google as quickly as possible.