I’m looking for some advice on how to approach this problem. I was testing out a Drupal installation on a domain that I intended to eventually use for a Wordpress blog. Once I pushed the Drupal site to its final destination, I deleted all the files and installed Wordpress. I configured and designed the WP blog site and posted my first entry. I then started to diagnose the site with Google Webmaster Tools. It turns out that Google had indexed the site with lots of the Drupal site’s content that no longer exists. Now I have search engine results and caches that contain a ton of junk content that is not relevant to the new blog. I also receive hundreds of “Not Found†errors in the webmaster tool’s crawl errors. I used Google’s remove URL feature and the robots.txt file to try and remove the invalid links from the search engine. However, it is not working correctly. Some pages get removed, some do not, and other just vanish for no reason. My primary url isn’t even listed now, and I never removed that. Could all these errors have prompted Google to remove me completely? If so, why are all these links still included? Here’s my primary question: Is there a way to wipe the slate clean? Can I have Google remove all indexed pages and all cache of a website, and begin reindexing the site from scratch? I’ve heard I’d be delisted for 6 months minimum, I don’t want that. I’d probably return to the search engine with all the Drupal junk still there anyhow. Any Advice?
first, make sure your old pages return a valid 404 header. Then you can request them removed via webmaster tools if you wish, or you can just wait an they will drop out of the index as you start adding new content. if you do request removal, the url you request to be removed is delisted for 6 months, not the entire domain. so definately don't request removal of the entire domain.