Luckily, there are processes that allow you to have content removed from Google’s index. If you already have a Webmaster Tools account, you can use the Remove URL tool to speed up the process. If you don’t have a Webmaster Tools account, you will need to add a noindex meta tag and wait for Google to crawl your content again. More details are available at Google Webmaster Central.

Before finishing up this task, you need to make sure that additional steps are taken so that your content isn’t re-crawled by Google spiders and indexed again. These steps should be taken before a site is launched, but are often overlooked or unknown to whomever owns the site. You can learn more about this on Google’s help pages.

Google Images logo

Search engines have come a long way in the last few years. Blended search has come to fruition, which means we are no longer just searching for Web pages, but all kinds of content including images, blogs, videos, products, etc. Because blended search is so prominent, it’s important to make sure all of your content is indexed. This post will focus on how to get your images indexed by Google so that they will appear in Google Images and hopefully in regular searches as well.

The secret to getting your images indexed is simple – optimize them. I suggest the following:

• Use an appropriate alt tag on all images
• Give each image a title
• Add image height and width in img tag
• Name the file using a relevant keyword (dashes between words)

If you have some extra time on your hands, check out this blog post for additional image optimizations tips.

Another point that needs attention is making sure your images can be found by search spiders. Make sure to check your robots.txt file to see if you are preventing any spiders from crawling parts of your sites that have images you want in the index.

Google Webmaster Tools gives you the option to have your images crawled, but whether or not they are prominent in the results will depend on optimization. Also, be patient. It can take months before your images are indexed properly by Google, which is all the more reason to get this done as soon as you can so you can benefit from some additional traffic.

The recent implementation of custom search techniques in Google searches make it an even stronger possibility. Obviously they value the user’s choice of listings when considering where to rank a site.

With this being said, don’t think getting spammy would work, even if this was true. First off, the algorithm would only take into account clicks from different IP addresses. So, don’t think you can keep clicking on results to your site from the same computer to boost rankings. In fact, if Google detects that you’re doing this, your site could theoretically be penalized without you even knowing it.

I don’t know the answer to this question, but it makes sense that it would play some role into how relevant a listing is for a particular search term. Some food for thought to get you through the week.