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Is it possible to permanently erase information from the internet search engines?

By Guest **m***e_***al***, in Tech corner

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Guest **m***e_***al***   

Guest **m***e_***al***
Posted

Short answer: No.

 

You could, edit the ad and replace the text, pictures, etc. with nonsense.

 

Most search engines will then update their store with the revised information.

 

You need to do this some time before an ad expires, because the search engines do not crawl sites on a regular or even predictable schedule.

 

There are some systems that permanently record web pages, and there is nothing you can do about those.

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roamingguy    300292

roamingguy
Posted

One other thing, even if you could do it and delete permanently web pages, there is nothing to say someone hasn't copied information or photos off that web page, and saved it to their computer, while the website was active. I was once told, once out on the web it's floating out there for good, for anyone to see

RG

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qwertyaccount    15793

qwertyaccount
Posted

Great point RG!

 

Consider anything put on the internet irrevocably out there. It is actually more permanent than carving things into stone.

 

These words as I type them will be around long after we've all turned to dust.

 

If you are reading this now, a copy is now stored on your computers cache.

 

Granted, most caches are supposed to be temporary, but if you back it up before it is automatically cleared, there is now another longer lifetime copy of my words that will exist until it is erased, overwritten or destroyed.

 

Sadly, the webpage revision method of trying to remove stuff from the search engines is about as good as it gets.

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bcguy42    38594

bcguy42
Posted

I agree with Qwerty ... once it is up there, it is out there. Do what you will to try to eliminate it. If you want to see it again, 20 years from now, run for Parliament. Someone will find it.

 

All the major search engines keep "cached" copies of web sites. In a previous life as a website developer, I've used that capability myself to look at old versions of sites that were several years old.

 

Sorry to reinforce the bad news.

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qwertyaccount    15793

qwertyaccount
Posted

If you would like to ask search engine robots to exclude your site (or parts of it), there are two ways to do this.

 

Ideally, you would put this in place before your site is published and the search engines have had a chance to visit.

 

First, is the "robots.txt" file:

 

Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

 

The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots.

The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.

 

 

There are two important considerations when using /robots.txt:

  • robots can ignore your /robots.txt. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
  • the /robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don't want robots to use.

More info here: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

 

Second is a meta tag on the web page:

 

You can use a special HTML <META> tag to tell robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow.

For example:

<html>

<head>

<title>...</title>

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

</head>

 

 

 

There are two important considerations when using the robots <META> tag:

  • robots can ignore your <META> tag. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
  • the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It's entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.

More info here: http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

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Reddog01    30280

Reddog01
Posted

I tried Mods' site link for an old url escort web site that was taken down or deleted and it didn't work in this case. Gone for ever?

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Kyra.Graves    23779

Kyra.Graves
Posted
One other thing, even if you could do it and delete permanently web pages, there is nothing to say someone hasn't copied information or photos off that web page, and saved it to their computer, while the website was active. I was once told, once out on the web it's floating out there for good, for anyone to see

RG

 

Most ad sites won't let you update the ad with nonsense as the domain could be blacklisted by some of the search engines. Many of the larger advertising sites have someone review or approve the ad or at least run it through a program to check it before it goes live - you may get the ad pulled for the update but the old information would still be in the archive.

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Guest **m***e_***al***   

Guest **m***e_***al***
Posted

thank you all for your very helpful input and feedback. If I had known this before posting the ad then I might have tried to make my information a little more anonymous considering the fact that I would like to have a career after this ...and I wouldnt really want to have my "past coming back to haunt me"...

 

but I guess there's no way to beat "big brother". this information is going to be floating on the net forever apparently :( I guess I won't be running for Prime Minister anytime soon lol

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