First of all, I want to preface this blog post with a thank you to Holiday Homes Direct for allowing us to publish this with their details. I can honestly say after doing SEO and helping out the community for a few years that I have learnt something completely new.

 

To set the scene, Brian had hired an SEO previously, after a disagreement the SEO seems to have enabled the remove url option on the site. This option was removing sitewide. The interesting thing is that enabling it on the http:// version seems to have disabled https:// too.

 

So, I did a bit of a test yesterday on one of my test websites. I enabled the remove url at 17:00, when I checked at roughly 19:30 the whole site was removed from Google’s index. I then re-enabled the site and by 23:00 the site was in Googles index again. So whilst Google says it may take 2-3 days it in-fact seems to be much quicker.

 

First of all apologies for the above not being very precise with numbers. So I attempted when sorting it in a real environment to get the best possible timing.

 

Removed request: 10:41

Time spotted indexed in Google: 12:18

That is less than two hours to be indexed again. (1 hour 37 minutes to be precise)

 

The interesting thing, it started to get traffic almost immediately. (The delay was due to me notifying Brian and Chris).

 

Another interesting fact, is that through the whole period of time the site has been removed, Google was crawling the site.