How can I get a web page removed from google's cache?

[NickFitz]

Thanks Nick.

I've seen that google has crawled the site after I removed the pages, and yet the removed pages are still cached so that would appear to shoot down peoples theories that "...it will just remove them automatically", unless maybe it takes several months?

I think I'll try out the Remove URL facility on one of the pages that I already deleted from the website and see how that goes.

What about the NOCACHE tag, should I add that to the remaining pages on the website?...

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

I've seen another variation on this...

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW,NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE">

I've no idea whether or not these work.

Cheers,
Jeff.

The ways of Google are hidden from the eyes of men, but AFAIK they don't necessarily remove stuff from the cache straight away on the grounds that it might just have gone missing temporarily - after all, making the content available during temporary outages is what the cache is for, so it would defeat the object somewhat if, as soon as it found it was needed, it erased itself Once the stuff has been gone for a while, it will remove it from the cache, but how long that while is only Google knows.

The Googlebot definitely respects all robot directives. If you don't want any of the site indexed, put a suitable robots.txt file in the root of the site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

or alternatively craft one that meets your specific requirements. The Google webmaster tools can help with that. Check out The Web Robots Pages if you want the nitty-gritty.