Yesterday for the first time , i used the google url removal tool , which is available under the Webmaster tools . I am happy to say that it was extremely efficient and quick . It was a personal family website , containing images which i dont want the whole world to see , but only members of my family who i share it with . To start with , i had never submitted the site in any directory or or posted its links in anywhere public , however , somehow there were almost 55 pages from the site in google's index. and not just that , it came up on a pretty simple keyword search , which was little too dangerous . So i just decided to give the url removal tool a try . Now the trick was : google said , you must use the tool after you follow the pre-requisites , which being - either use the Meta robots tag in the pages , and/or use a robots.txt specifying disallow spidering . I went ahead and did both lol , and then submitted the SITE ( not just directory or url's ) and voila today just now i checked ... the site has disappeared without a trace both from its index as well as SERP and even better , theres no cache too