How can I remove copyrighted trademarks indexed by Google?

Question

A company has issued the company I work for a cease and desist for a certain term we have been using to describe many products on the website. So we are currently going to do as they say and replace that term with a different term. But the problem is, the search feature on our web site is powered by Google site search. And when I make a change it usually takes a number of weeks before they are changed in Google's index. So after we change everything to no longer say this term, if you search our site for the term you will still find results until Google's index gets updated. We don't want them to see this and think we have not complied. So what would you recommend, is there a way to get Google to remove that keyword from their index of our site...is there something else we can do?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

It sounds like you don't publish an XML sitemap for Google; if you set one up, that can vastly improve the speed at which your site's changes are reindexed. It includes the ability to advise on how important particular pages are to crawl, so you can set the pages that you've changed to maximum priority and the rest to low.

Failing that, you can request that Google deindex the pages entirely using their Webmaster tools. That's kind of a scorched-earth tactic, though, and it takes a while -- the sitemap option might actually be faster.

Answer 2

Google's index is updated more frequently than once in a number of weeks.

Is this a Google Custom Search Engine (http://www.google.com/cse)? If so, you can add an on demand sitemap. Also, you can add your website to the google webmasters tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) and add a sitemap. In a sitemap you can specify how often content is updated. Google will then crawl and update your website. More info on sitemaps