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Removing Your Blog From The Search Engines Cache

When you were young, did you ever play with a dandelion?

I have - they are (in some places) easy to find, and free fun to be had (don't let your parents see you though). Did you ever blow on one, watch the pieces fly thru the air, then run around and try to pick the pieces up? That's your blog, all over the net.

The only way to kill dandelions is while they are young, yellow, and solid.

When dandelions get old, white, and airy, just touching one will make it blow into pieces. The pieces go everywhere, and next year, you'll have more dandelions everywhere. That's when your parents will have to deal with the problem.

Some search engines take feeds from, and provide feeds to, other search engines.

If your blog is indexed in Google, MSN, and / or Yahoo this month, next week it will be indexed elsewhere. You can request Google to remove your blog (website) from their indexing; removing it from Google won't get it removed everywhere, though. This will be more effective if you first use Google Webmaster Tools, Tools - "Generate robots.txt", and select "Block all robots".

This is one process in deleting your blog, but it's not the easiest process to execute.

If you truly want to remove a blog from existence, you have to replace it with a stub blog, and then leave the blog alone.

  • Delete all of the posts in the blog.
  • Delete any personal information in the profile.
  • Add a stub post.
  • Leave the URL in place.


The major search engines have provided tools to manage cached content, too. Both Google (with Google Webmaster Tools) and Yahoo (with Yahoo Site Explorer) let you explicitly change settings and affect search engine caches, for the blogs / web sites for which you can prove ownership.

When a search engine spider goes looking for your blog, to update its cache, and gets a "404 - Not Found" error, it makes sure that what's in cache stays in cache. Search engines keep cached copies of everything that they index, intentionally. Look at any search hit list - each item in the list will offer you the cached view, as well as the current view. So, if your blog isn't online, no problem. Just make sure that the cached copy is still there.

So if you delete the blog, and it never gets seen again, the search engine simply keeps the cache. If you replace the contents of the blog with a stub - an empty post - the search engine updates its cache with that post.

You can only kill dandelions by killing the roots (using chemicals). You can only kill cached blogs by killing the roots, too (using stub blogs).

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