How to de-index a URL from Google

De-indexing is a technical action with specific prerequisites. It is not a complaints process.

If you control the page

• Delete it and return 410 Gone. The cleanest signal. A 404 works too, just more slowly.
• Add a noindex meta tag and leave the page reachable so the crawler can see the directive. Blocking it in robots.txt at the same time is the classic error: if the crawler cannot fetch the page, it never reads the noindex.
• Use the Search Console Removals tool to suppress it in the interim. This is temporary, roughly six months, and does not replace the permanent signal.
• Password protect it where the content must stay online but not be public.

Noindex and robots.txt disallow together cancel each other out. Pick one.

If you do not control the page

You have three doors. Persuade the owner to remove or noindex it. Qualify under a Google policy removal, such as personal identifying information. Or obtain a court order finding the content unlawful, which Google will consider for de-listing.

Nothing else de-indexes a third party's page. Filing repeated requests without one of those three does not work and consumes the weeks in which something else could have been tried.

After the page is gone

Search results and cached snippets can persist briefly after the page is removed. Requesting a recrawl and using the Removals tool speeds this up.

If the same content is republished elsewhere, and it often is, you are dealing with syndication rather than a single URL. Each copy is its own removal target, which is why acting early is worth more than acting thoroughly later.