How to remove negative posts from Google Index

[mojijoy]

Is there a way to remove / edit or not index the negative post from the community from Google Search Result Page?

[OlivierS]

@mojijoy

You can try following the steps here.

Or changemodify your robots.txt (if any) to ignore the URL so crawlers don't index it (but will take some time)

[mojijoy]

Thank you for your help 🙂 

[kalak]

One thing to remember is that sometimes negative posts are a good thing, especially if your staff, or community, get a good resolutions for the person who made the initial post.

[PaoloT]

@kalak that's a really good point, everyone can "do ok" if it's plain sailing, but if things are going south it does make a difference to be able to see and judge if the reaction is appropriate during difficulties. I have myself recently choosen a service not only based on the average good positive reviews, but also being satisfied with the firm's replies to negative comments.

[tealiumjustin]

Any tips on removing articles from the Lithium search results page?

[ClaudiusH]

Are your referring to the Lithium platform search or the search results shown by Google for content on your community domain?

In general if you want content removed you would move it to an access restricted internal board. This allows you to have the content still preserved for documentation reasons. Visitors and traffic to the old link will see a permission restriction message.

You should be very careful with removing content though as it should always be in adherence with your community guidelines. Otherwise you can quickly lose your visitors' and members' trust in hosting an open and fair discussion. You would open the classic "this community is being censored" argument.

Do you want to share why you are thinking about removing content? Maybe there's a better approach as already shared earlier in this very topic.

[Fellsteruk]

Do you have goole search console? 

You can remove URLs from google's index if you do, its free and easy to setup. 

[ClaudiusH]

To @Fellsteruk's point: Here's how to delist URLs from your Google search results using the Google Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

...and here's how to do the same for Bing (which is also the underlying search engine for various other [mobile] services, so worth removing on both): https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/block-urls-from-bing-264e560a

[tealiumjustin]

@ClaudiusHThanks for the reply. Yes, I'm referring to Lithium search. I'm trying to handle versioning. We have TKB articles for "Feature X (current version)", as well as older articles for "Feature X version 1", "Feature X version 2", "Feature X version 3", etc. The older articles are linked from the main article so that they can still be accessed, but we prefer them not to appear in search results so we can funnel everyone through the main article. I'm open to alternative solutions.

[ClaudiusH]

Thanks for the additional details, @tealiumjustin.That makes sense. There is currently no simple switch to hide individual content items from the community search.

What I can think might work out for your scenario is introducing a parallel hidden "Archive" top level category. The benefit of this would be that any search originating from your public community top level category would automatically default to the search scope on this public category.

So let's say your current community structure looks like this with two categories for documentation and discussion and some TKB and discussion and group nodes in each:

 

Now if you would convert this to one with an added top-level category "Community" and a parallel "Archive category" that contains the archive for your knowledge base like this:

You would move all outdated feature articles into the "Product Knowledgebase (Archive)" node that sits in the archive top-level category where it would still be accessible, but not returned in any search within the "Community" category.

And no worries to confuse users by the additional step in your breadcrumb navigation as you can set up top-level categories to be treat as the topmost node of your structure.

You can see this approach being used for a multi-language community at Skype on one community instance. Eeach language is a different top-level category. If you perform a search in each language category you will only get content from that:

• English language category: https://community.skype.com/?category.id=English
• Spanish language category: https://community.skype.com/?category.id=es
• French language category: https://community.skype.com/?category.id=Francais

More information in the article "Create and set up top-level categories"

[tealiumjustin]

This is very helpful. I will explore this strategy. Thank you!